Preamble

The House met at half-past Two o'clock

PRAYERS

[Mr. SPEAKER in the Chair]

MESSAGE FROM THE QUEEN

THE WEST INDIES (GIFT OF MACE)

The VICE-CHAMBERLAIN OF THE HOUSEHOLD reported Her Majesty's answer to the Address, as follows:

I have received your Address praying that I will give directions for the presentation on behalf of your House of a Mace to the House of Representatives of the West Indies, and assuring Me that you will make good the expenses attending the same. It gave Me the greatest pleasure to learn that you, House desires to make such a presentation and I will gladly give directions for carrying your proposal into effect.

Oral Answers to Questions — SHIPPING

Nuclear Propulsion (Safety)

Mr. Awbery: asked the Minister of Transport and Civil Aviation what consideration has been given to the risks that may be involved to the crews of ships that will use nuclear power for propulsion; and, in view of the fact that such vessels will shortly be placed in commission, if he will take steps to have this matter placed upon the agenda of the appropriate committee of the International Labour Organisation, or referred to the chief maritime nations for consideration.

The Minister of Transport and Civil Aviation (Mr. Harold Watkinson): I have recently invited all the interests in this country to be represented on a committee which will advise me on all the safety problems arising from nuclear propulsion at sea and in port. Her Majesty's Government have also proposed to the contracting Governments of the Inter-

national Convention for the Safety of Life at Sea that a conference should be held in 1960 at which this might be considered.

Mr. Awbery: But I understand that some of these ships will be in operation next year. In view of the developments that may take place, will the Minister make sure that the health and conditions of the seamen and the effects of nuclear power upon them are discussed before these ships are put into commission?

Mr. Watkinson: Perhaps the hon. Gentleman did not catch the first part of my Answer, which was that, as far as this country is concerned, the Committee will sit almost at once and will make recommendations.

Mr. Awbery: Will the Minister press on with this business?

Portsmouth Harbour (Flag Signals)

Dr. Bennett: asked the Minister of Transport and Civil Aviation whether, in the interests of safe navigation, he will cause to be displayed more prominently than at present the flag signals which indicate movements of shipping out of Portsmouth commercial basin into Portsmouth Harbour.

The Joint Parliamentary Secretary to the Ministry of Transport and Civil Aviation (Mr. Airey Neave): The display of these signals is a matter for the Portsmouth Corporation in consultation with the Admiralty. I am bringing my hon. Friend's suggestion to the notice of these authorities.

Dr. Bennett: Is my hon. Friend aware that the signals as hoisted at present are all but invisible to even an experienced shipmaster entering from outside the harbour, and that any ships entering on flood tide are quite unable to stop if they find a commercial vessel coming out round that particular corner? Will my hon. Friend consider either the repeating of such signals on the Round Tower, Sally Port or on Pickfords Wharf, or a different but appropriate signal being hoisted on Fort Blockhouse, which is visible from a long way off?

Mr. Neave: While my right hon. Friend has no power to direct the Corporation to display these flags more prominently, I will bring to its notice the suggestion my hon. Friend has made.

Oral Answers to Questions — TRANSPORT

Car Delivery Vehicles (Licences)

Miss Burton: asked the Minister of Transport and Civil Aviation if he is now in a position to make a statement concerning the operation of car delivery vehicles under general trade licences, when carriers' A or B licences are not required; and what steps he now proposes to take to deal with this anomaly.

Mr. Watkinson: I am still examining possible means of removing the anomaly, and I will let the hon. Lady know the result as soon as possible.

Miss Burton: While thanking the right hon. Gentleman for the detailed, courteous and, I think, meant-to-be-helpful reply that I received this morning, might I ask if he is aware that it is really unsatisfactory? What is the use of stating in that reply that he regards the operation of car transporters under trade licences as an abuse of the purpose for which the licences were designed if we cannot do anything about it? As I first raised this matter with him on 29th January, does he not really think that we might have an Amendment to the Finance Bill this year?

Mr. Watkinson: I think that when I first answered the hon. Lady's Question she was surprised that I was to do anything at all. I am now surprised that she is so impatient, because in the letter to which she refers I say that one needs to give thought to this; otherwise, in removing one anomaly we may be creating another.

Mr. Ernest Davies: Is it not the fact that these car delivery vehicles carry new cars on the basis of hire and reward in the same way as is done on A and B licences? That being so, surely it would not be so difficult to introduce an Amendment to the Finance Bill. After all, there is still some time yet before that Bill will be presented to the House. Will the right hon. Gentleman urge his Department to bring this anomaly to an end?

Mr. Watkinson: The hon. Gentleman will not expect me to comment on the Finance Bill.

Lighting-up Times

Captain Pilkington: asked the Minister of Transport and Civil Aviation whether, in the interests of road safety,

he will review the present regulations for vehicles turning on their lights from half an hour after sunset until half an hour before sunrise.

The Joint Parliamentary Secretary to the Ministry of Transport and Civil Aviation (Mr. G. R. H. Nugent): For many years, lighting-up time during winter has been from half an hour after sunset to half an hour before sunrise, and I have no evidence that any alteration is required on safety grounds.

Captain Pilkington: Does not my hon. Friend agree that his own Minister's Annual Report says that a very large proportion of accidents do occur at about lighting-up time? In view of that fact, would it not be a good idea to advance the time?

Mr. Nugent: I am not sure that it would assist in this matter, and it might create serious anomalies in the North to require people to drive about in full daylight with lights on.

Mr. F. Noel-Baker: While the Parliamentary Secretary has this in mind, could he look again at cyclists, some of whom do not light up at all?

Mr. Nugent: I rather think that is a matter for the police rather than for me.

Rural Bus Services (Utility Vehicles)

Sir W. Anstruther-Gray: asked the Minister of Transport and Civil Aviation what steps he is taking to draw the attention of potential omnibus operators in rural areas to his new regulations pemitting the use of 12-seat singly-operated utility vehicles.

Mr. Nugent: On the day the regulations were laid, we issued a Press notice about the changes, which was extensively quoted in the national Press. Copies of the Press notice were also sent to more than 40 organisations, and their help was sought in bringing the new regulations to the notice of all who they thought might benefit from them.

Sir W. Anstruther-Gray: Will my hon. Friend urge Traffic Commissioners to give all possible encouragement to rural bus operators?

Mr. Nugent: They have already been urged to do so, and are giving it.

Light Goods Vehicles (Speed Limit)

Mr. Chapman: asked the Minister of Transport and Civil Aviation whether, now that the speed limit for heavier goods vehicles has been raised from 20 to 30 miles per hour, and the speed limit in certain areas is being raised to 40 miles per hour, he will now raise the speed limit of the lightest vans and similar small goods vehicles from 30 miles per hour to 40 miles per hoar outside restricted areas.

Mr. Watkinson: I am considering whether any change is desirable in the speed limit for light goods vehicles.

Mr.Chapman: Will not the Minister gather together more opinion from the police authorities? Is it not a fact that the Metropolitan Police, for example, are in support of raising the speed limit? Will there not be less opposition from the unions in this matter than in the case of heavy goods vehicles, because these vans are mainly in the 30 miles-an-hour limit area anyway, they are very largely owner-used, and there is not the great strain on men of driving them over long distances as there is in the case of heavy goods vehicles?

Mr. Watkinson: I note the hon. Gentleman's support for this alteration in the speed limit. We are collecting the kind of technical advice he has mentioned, and I will give it consideration as soon as I have it.

Mr. Page: Will my right hon. Friend resist the application of this leap-frogging principle to speed limits, which can only result in an increase in accidents?

Mr. Watkinson: I do not think that my hon. Friend's point is borne out by the facts.

Staggering of Working Hours (Report)

Mr. Partridge: asked the Minister of Transport and Civil Aviation whether the Report of the Committee for the Staggering of Working Hours is now ready for publication; and if he will make a statement.

Mr. Watkinson: The Report is being published today and copies will be available in the Vote Office at 3 p.m. The Report shows that the campaign has made a promising start but that there is still

much to be done to convince employers and staff of the advantages of staggered hours. Staggering of hours offers the best practical solution to the problem of congestion at peak hours, and at a meeting which I had last Monday with the Committee and the Chairman of Zone Sub-Committees we considered how the campaign should be developed. I have assured the Committee of my full support for its efforts, which I expect to have an increasing impact on London travel.

Vehicles (Indicator Lights)

Mr. Isaacs: asked the Minister of Transport and Civil Aviation if his attention has been drawn to the large stop and direction lights on cars recently coming on to the roads fitted with lamps of a very high power which, in the hours of darkness, dazzle the drivers of following cars; and if, in the interests of road safety, he is now ready to make regulations laying down a maximum brilliance of such lamps, as a result of his consultation with the car industry.

Mr. Nugent: We have recently circulated proposals for changes in the law relating to direction indicators, including one to limit the intensity of trafficator lights. We have also discussed with the industry the problem as it affects stop lights, and a maximum intensity has been included in the standard of recommended practice recently issued by the Society of Motor Manufacturers and Traders.

Mr. Isaacs: Does the Minister realise that we are grateful for the action he has taken to meet this very great inconvenience? I saw a car the other night with a stop light 4 in. across. It had a warship searchlight in it instead of a bulb. This is a terrible menace. I am sure that all motorists who have to drive at night will be grateful when action is taken.

Mr. E. Johnson: Does my hon. Friend not think that the time has very nearly come when he must stop consulting and must make regulations to deal with these matters? This great diversity of lights is a real danger to motorists.

Mr. Nugent: My right hon. Friend has undertaken to make regulations as from the beginning of next year with all new registered vehicles. We have every intention of keeping to that programme.

Road Accidents

Mr. Page: asked the Minister of Transport and Civil Aviation to what cause he attributes the increase in casualties per road accident in 1957, as compared with 1956.

Mr. Nugent: While there is no single or simple reason for this increase, the proportion of accidents involving more than one vehicle is increasing, and this gives rise to more casualties per accident. The increase is in line with a generally rising trend over the past 30 years, and is largely the result of the growth in motor traffic.

Mr. Page: Is it not clear that the increase in casualties and in the seriousness of casualties per accident must be due to the greater speed at which traffic is travelling? What is my hon. Friend doing about it?

Mr. Nugent: I do not necessarily agree. Although the speed is, of course, an element in the matter, my hon. Friend's deduction is not necessarily right.

Mr. Strauss: In view of the fact that accidents are increasing, as might to some extent be expected with the larger number of cars on the roads, is it not time to organise again a big nation-wide road safety campaign, as was done some few years ago, getting the co-operation of the local authorities, but doing it on a much bigger scale than local effort can manage?

Mr. Nugent: We are undertaking our usual road safety campaign in full co-operation with the road safety authorities and our 1,200 local road safety committees, and we are now considering whether we can give an extra impetus to it.

Mr. Page: asked the Minister of Transport and Civil Aviation whether, having regard to the number of road accidents attributed in 1957 to drivers making right turns without warning, he will initiate legislation making such conduct an offence, irrespective of the presence of other traffic on the road.

Mr. Watkinson: This matter is already dealt with in the Highway Code. I do not think that the technique of safe driving can be dealt with satisfactorily by legislation.

Mr. Page: It has been dealt with in the Highway Code for a long time. Is it not true that in the latest report the item "Turning right without warning" shows the greatest number of accidents? Does my right hon. Friend not have some proposal to make to prevent the increase of accidents from this cause?

Mr. Watkinson: I sympathise with my hon. Friend, and I think that his judgment is right. I am considering whether we can do anything of this kind concerning the new motor roads.

Mr. H. Hynd: Is that not already an offence of driving without due care and attention?

Mr. Watkinson: Yes, it might be.

Motor Vehicle Testing (Fee)

Mr. Ernest Davies: asked the Minister of Transport and Civil Aviation the basis on which he fixed the fee for the testing of motor vehicles by authorised agents at 15s.

Mr. Watkinson: The basis for computing the fee was the estimated average time required for carrying out the test to the standard required by the Ministry when charged at the rates generally in force in garages for work demanding corresponding technical skill.

Mr. Davies: Does the Minister recall that when the Road Traffic Bill was going through the House in 1956 the then Parliamentary Secretary, now Minister of Works, stated that on the basis of the Ministry's own testing station at Hendon, the charge for the public would be only 5s.? Here a charge of three times as much is being made by the garages. It is true that the 5s. did not include capital costs, but on the other hand there will be no, or negligible, capital costs for the garages.

Mr. Watkinson: I agree with the hon. Member, and I have been to the trouble of looking this up. Two figures—6s. and 5s.—were given. The 5s. was based on a testing time of 15 minutes. Having now had further practical experience, we are satisfied that the time taken for a test will be not 15 minutes but 45 minutes. Therefore, the new charge is exactly proportional to the old one.

Oral Answers to Questions — ROADS

Western Avenue (Dual Carriageways)

Captain Pilkington: asked the Minister of Transport and Civil Aviation when it is proposed to widen and have dual carriageways on the western end of Western Avenue.

Mr. Nugent: I would refer my hon. and gallant Friend to the reply given on 26th March to my hon. Friend the Member for Buckinghamshire, South (Mr. Ronald Bell).

Captain Pilkington: Will my hon. Friend say how long ago it was planned to increase this road to a dual carriageway, and can he add anything about when this improvement is likely to be carried out?

Mr. Nugent: My right hon. Friend has said that we have the matter under consideration now to see when, and if, we can include it in our current road programme.

Mr. Beswick: Will the Parliamentary Secretary look at the Answer he gave to my Written Question yesterday, which showed that there have been 130 accidents during the last two years on this stretch of roadway? Does he not think that this calls for some work to be done?

Mr. Nugent: I quite agree, of course, that it is desirable to have this work done. Our problem is one of priorities. We shall certainly have it done as soon as we can.

Brimsdown Road and Ponders End (Level Crossings)

Mr. Ernest Davies: asked the Minister of Transport and Civil Aviation whether he has yet reached a decision in regard to the elimination of the level crossings at Brimsdown and Ponders End, Enfield; and when authorisation for the necessary work will be given.

Mr. Nugent: My right hon. Friend has informed the Middlesex County Council that we are ready to consider a scheme for a new road and. bridge across the railway at Ponders End from Lea Valley Road to Nags Head Road with a road connection on the east side to the Brims-down industrial area. If the details of the scheme are satisfactory, I hope that

we shall be able to approve it in this financial year.

Mr. Davies: While thanking the Minister for that reply and congratulating him on having succeeded in achieving agreement among the various parties and authorities concerned, as this scheme has been hanging fire for a very long time, may I urge him to speed up this matter as much as possible in view of the continued congestion in this area?

Mr. Nugent: We shall do it as quickly as we can.

Tamar Bridge

Mr. Hayman: asked the Minister of Transport and Civil Aviation whether he will make a statement on the latest application of the Tamar Bridge Authority for sanction to proceed with plans and preparatory work.

Mr. Watkinson: I am still considering this matter.

Mr. Hayman: Will the Minister bear in mind that
Hope deferred maketh the heart sick"?
Cornwall and Plymouth have been waiting years for this bridge and need to carry on with the preparatory work if only because of the heavy unemployment in Cornwall and Devon?

Mr. Watkinson: I have said that I am considering this matter, and in the road programme as a whole at least there is not as much hope deferred as there was.

Pedestrian Crossings

Mr. Page: asked the Minister of Transport and Civil Aviation if he will give an estimate of the comparative cost of construction, disregarding re-siting of main services, of a pedestrian subway and ramps under a 48 ft. wide road, or other convenient width, and of the construction of a footbridge, over a similar road, level with the footwalk, the roadway being lowered to allow vehicles to pass underneath.

Mr. Nugent: The latter would probably cost more than six times the former.

Mr. Page: Would not my hon. Friend agree that bridges have proved useless if raised over the roadway? Has not the principle of lowering the road been used to some extent on the Continent? Can we not try it here?

Mr. Nugent: If my hon. Friend accepts the purport of my first reply, he will realise that it is likely to cost of the order of £130,000 to do as he suggests. Clearly, we shall do much better by proceeding with pedestrian underpasses at a cost of about £20,000.

Hatfield (Doncaster)

Mr. G. Jeger: asked the Minister of Transport and Civil Aviation (1) whether he is aware that the proposed widening of corners of roads at Hatfield, near Doncaster, will increase the danger from heavy traffic to pedestrians, will disfigure the village and damage historic property; and whether he will suspend the work while further investigating the local position;
(2) when it is intended to start work on the by-pass to the village of Hatfield, near Doncaster, for which land was acquired 27 years ago.

Mr. Nugent: The purpose of the proposed improvements in Hatfield is to improve the safety and movement of traffic and pedestrians. They do not involve the demolition of any buildings. In view of local difficulties, we are considering whether it is possible to expedite the scheme for the by-pass.

Mr. Jeger: In the meantime, will the Parliamentary Secretary undertake to abandon the scheme for felling trees, removing footpaths and daubing the walls with black and white paint, which will disfigure this very pleasant village? Can he give any indication when the by-pass will be started?

Mr. Nugent: No. I cannot do more than say that, because of the local difficulties about making these road widenings and improvements, we are considering again when the by-pass could be built.

Oral Answers to Questions — RAILWAYS

Improvements

Captain Pilkington: asked the Minister of Transport and Civil Aviation what financial outlay he has sanctioned for railway improvements this year.

Mr. Watkinson: I would refer my hon. and gallant Friend to the reply I gave to the hon. Member for The Hartlepools (Mr. D. Jones) on 13th November last.

Captain Pilkington: Is any further expenditure likely to result in an improvement in the punctuality of trains? Is my right hon. Friend aware that there is a very widespread feeling that the punctuality of the nationalised British Railways is very much worse than on the railways before the war when they were under private enterprise? Can he confirm that?

Mr. Watkinson: Perhaps my hon. Friend has noticed the very large order recently placed for the new British Deltic locomotives by British Railways. We must look in the acceleration of the modernisation plan for increased speeds and increased punctuality. It is, therefore, to modernisation that one must look for improvements, and not take too many glances at the past.

Mr. Ernest Davies: Is not the modernisation programme being retarded by the Minister's action in restricting the amount of capital investment for the British Transport Commission this year to £145 million? Has he any evidence at all of a deterioration in punctuality to which his hon. and gallant Friend referred? Is it not a fact that figures have been published showing a steady improvement in the punctuality of the railways under nationalisation?

Mr. Watkinson: There is a Question about modernisation later on the Order Paper.

Modernisation Plan

Mr. G. Wilson: asked the Minister of Transport and Civil Aviation what progress has been made by British Railways with the capital modernisation plan.

Mr. Watkinson: The programme has got under way much more quickly than was originally forecast. Important matters of technical and commercial policy have been decided, and a large part of the programme is now committed.

Mr. Wilson: Can my right hon. Friend say to what extent the programme is up to schedule or above schedule?

Mr. Watkinson: The programme is well ahead of schedule, but equally it is only fair to say that, for the next two years, cuts have been made in the level of expenditure that the railways would have liked, due mostly to the great acceleration which they have managed to put in the programme. I think the fair


answer to my hon. Friend's question is that the programme is well ahead, but it is not quite so far ahead as it would have been if I had allowed the railways to spend a great deal more money than would be in the national interest at the moment.

Mr. Strauss: Can the Minister say to what extent the balancing date of 1962, which was stated in the White Paper setting out the modernisation plan, will in fact be postponed as a result of the cuts in capital expenditure which he has imposed?

Mr. Watkinson: I have been advised by the Commission that the present cuts do not invalidate that date.

Finance

Mr. Ernest Davies: asked the Minister of Transport and Civil Aviation what was the level of advances to the British Transport Commission under the Transport (Railway Finances) Act, 1957, for 1958 and 1959 contemplated by the White Paper proposals for the Railways, Command Paper 9880; and under what authority he informed the Commission, in his letter of 22nd October, 1957, that the advances for 1959 would be reduced in accordance with the forecast on which the White Paper was based.

Mr. Watkinson: The 1957 Act authorises the Minister to make advances up to £250 million in total, leaving him free to determine what sums shall be advanced within this limit. The White Paper contemplated that in 1958 the deficit would be rather less than £60 million and would be substantially reduced in 1959.

Mr. Davies: Is this not the first time the House has been informed that the Minister proposed to limit the amounts on an annual basis rather than keep them within the total £250 million? Does this not put the Commission in a ridiculous financial position, as part of its deficit will be financed by the Treasury and part must be carried forward in its accounts? Would it not be better to meet the total deficit in the way originally intended under the Act?

Mr. Watkinson: No. I think that the hon. Member misunderstands me. I am saying that the Transport Commission must cut its costs by economies in order

to meet the reduction which1 have indicated.

Mr. Davies: Is not the Minister putting the Commission in an impossible position? On the one hand, he says that it must keep its deficit within a certain limit and, on the other hand, he withholds the means for the Commission to reduce the deficit, first, by imposing capital restrictions and, secondly, by not allowing the Commission to put up its charges to meet wage claims.

Mr. Watkinson: The House must judge whether £1,500 million devoted to modernisation, spread over a number of years, I agree, and £250 million to finance a deficit is not as much as the country can at the moment afford to devote out of its scarce capital resources to this most important task.

Oral Answers to Questions — CIVIL AVIATION

Independent Operators (Facilities and Services)

Mr. Chapman: asked the Minister of Transport and Civil Aviation how far, by its terms of reference and its constitution under the Civil Aviation (Air Transport Advisory Council) Order, 1947, the Air Transport Advisory Council is expected to make a physical inspection of facilities and services provided by air operators; and what is its present practice in this matter.

Mr. Watkinson: The Council has the necessary powers to undertake inspections of this kind, but it is for it to decide how far this is necessary: it has not, in practice, made many such inspections.

Mr. Chapman: Would it not be a rather good idea if they did? I am not criticising anybody, but with the enormous growth of the independent air operators' work in the last four or five years, would it not be a good thing if there were occasional checks on the standard of service, punctuality, and so on which they provide? Might it not be a useful check now that they are going so far?

Mr. Watkinson: Of course, my own Department carries out that kind of check and has only recently carried out checks on quite a number of independent airlines, as part of its normal duties. I will draw what the hon. Gentleman has


said to the attention of the Council, but I think that, on the whole, working in with my Department, the inspections are carried out with reasonable regularity.

Turbo-prop Airliners (Fares)

Mr. Robert Cooke: asked the Minister of Transport and Civil Aviation whether, in view of the substantially lower running costs of the turbo-prop airliner, such as the Britannia, as compared with the United States turbo-jet airliners, he will give a general direction to British Overseas Airways Corporation to seek the agreement of the International Air Transport Association to permit it to charge fares that are related to the running costs of these airliners.

Mr. Watkinson: In the absence of actual experience of long-range turbo-jet aircraft in passenger service, it cannot yet be established that the costs of operating long-range turbo-prop aircraft are, in fact, substantially lower. British Overseas Airways Corporation informs me, however, that, if it is established that a sufficient difference does exist, it will, of course, consider the question of differential fares.

Mr. Cooke: Does not my right hon. Friend agree that one of the outstanding characteristics of these airliners is their economy of operation, which could be still further exploited with the removal of the tariff which gives unfair advantage to our American competitors?

Mr. Watkinson: I think that the answer is in my original Reply, where I said that B.O.A.C. would be only too willing to put forward a case for differential fares, but, of course, it must have the facts for comparison, and they cannot be had until these new long range turbo-jets are in operation.

London Airport (Report)

Sir W. Wakefield: asked the Minister of Transport and Civil Aviation if he has now reached a decision on the Report of the Millbourn Committee on the future development of London Airport; and whether he will make a statement.

Mr. Watkinson: I have decided to accept the recommendations of the Mill-bourn Committee as the framework of future development at London Airport.

The next phase will include the construction of additional aircraft stands in the central terminal for which tenders will be invited next month. Designs are also well advanced for a new passenger building in the central terminal for the long-haul operators to take the place of the temporary buildings on the Bath Road.

Sir W. Wakefield: Could my right hon. Friend state the timetable of the programme for the next stage of construction which he has just described to the House?

Mr. Watkinson: What I said is that the most urgent thing is the new acreage of concrete for the big new jets and propjet aircraft which are coming into service. That will be followed immediately, I hope, by work on the new passenger terminal building, which also we want to have open, at least in part, within the next two or three years.

Prestwick Airport

Mr. Rankin: asked the Minister of Transport and Civil Aviation whether he will now make a statement about the future development of Prestwick Airport.

Mr. Watkinson: Her Majesty's Government have decided in principle that Prestwick Airport should be developed to enable it to accommodate the big jets. It will be necessary to lengthen the main runway and to provide a new terminal area. I have therefore given instructions for planning and preliminary surveys to proceed as rapidly as possible, while the airlines are being consulted about precise operating requirements. I shall also need to be satisfied that the jets will keep their noise to a tolerable level. I shall, of course, consult my right hon. Friend the Secretary of State for Scotland at all stages.

Mr. Rankin: While appreciating that statement, may I ask the Minister whether he is aware that it does not go much beyond what we had hoped for? Would he answer one or two further points? When does he think the plans will materialise? Now that we are thinking of a new terminal area, will it be sited so near to the railway as to enable passengers to be transported by rail to Glasgow? Thirdly, in considering with the Secretary of State the necessary diversion


of the main road, will he think of tunnelling it under the western end of the terminal?

Mr. Watkinson: We have all those things under consideration. The easiest way would be for me to write to the hon. Gentleman in order to set the matter out. I try to set myself a high standard and try to do better than the hon. Gentleman hopes for.

Sir T. Moore: While acknowledging with gratitude this long awaited statement from the Minister and congratulating him on his achievement with the Treasury, which no doubt took place, does this decision in effect mean that Prestwick will be at long last, instead of as hitherto a name, an international airport capable of taking the heaviest airliners the world can produce?

Mr. Watkinson: Yes. I think that that is a fair remark by my hon. Friend. That is the programme upon which we are starting. Whilst it will take some time to complete, we have now the necessary finance and necessary plans to go ahead.

Mr. Emrys Hughes: Is the Minister aware that last week a delegation from the Russian Minister of Civil Aviation visited Prestwick and expressed itself as satisfied with the arrangements at Prestwick? Is he also aware that this announcement will be welcomed in Ayrshire? [Interruption.] This is a step forward to international friendship which the Prime Minister seeks. But can the Minister assure us that the new runway at Prestwick will take the new Russian jets on their way to America?

Mr. Watkinson: I have said that we are discussing the length of the runway with the aircraft operators.

Civil Aerodromes (Approach Areas)

Mr. Farey-Jones: asked the Minister of Transport and Civil Aviation to what extent the new arrangements relating to construction within the approach areas of busy aerodromes will apply only to civil aerodromes; and which ones will be affected.

Mr. Watkinson: In agreement with my right hon. Friends the Secretary of State for Scotland and the Minister of Housing and Local Government, and with the

Government of Northern Ireland, I have decided that the new arrangements should apply to the following civil airports operated by my Department: London, Birmingham, Southampton, Blackbushe, Gatwick, Stansted, Renfrew, Prestwick and Nutts Corner. I am consulting the owners of Manchester and Southend Airports and of Lydd about the extension of the new arrangements to these airports. In addition, I understand that similar action is proposed as regards certain of the aerodromes controlled by my noble Friend the First Lord of the Admiralty and my right hon. Friends the Secretary of State for Air and the Minister of Supply.

Mr. Farey-Jones: Whilst thanking the Minister for the composite nature of that reply, may I ask him whether he will kindly undertake, in view of the supreme importance of this matter, to keep it at the top of his list of priorities?

Mr. Watkinson: Yes. We have now made progress in clearly setting out the airports where this safeguarding will take place, and now we shall be able to go ahead with the actual work.

Helicopters (Thames Landing Facilities)

Mr. Lipton: asked the Minister of Transport and Civil Aviation when helicopter landing facilities will be provided on or near the River Thames in central London.

Mr. Neave: Applications by two private firms for planning permission to provide helicopter landing facilities on the River Thames in Central London are to be heard at public local inquiries arranged by my right hon. Friend the Minister of Housing and Local Government. I cannot anticipate his decisions.

Mr. Lipton: Will not the hon. Gentleman agree that such facilities ought to be available in a capital city like London? Will he also say that this interesting and useful enterprise on the part of a Battersea engineering firm generally has his approval?

Mr. Neave: I think that the approval must come from my right hon. Friend the Minister of Housing and Local Government. Perhaps the hon. Gentleman would like to know that the applications are for a site near York Road,


Battersea, and for a floating pontoon adjoining the Albert Embankment, Lambeth.

Cambrian Airways Limited

Mr. Beswick: asked the Minister of Transport and Civil Aviation to what extent he agreed to the share-holding which British European Airways has taken in Cambrian Airways; what proportion this represents of the capital of the Cambrian Company; and if he will state the number of directors which he will nominate on the board of the company.

Mr. Watkinson: B.E.A. has recently acquired 33 per cent. of the capital of Cambrian Airways Limited. Lord Douglas informed me of this proposal, which I support. Although I have no powers to appoint any directors to the Board of Cambrian Airways, B.E.A. has appointed two directors.

Mr. Beswick: Since the name of Mr. Kenneth Davies has been mentioned in a recent debate on this matter in relation to his position both on the board of B.E.A. and the Cambrian Company, is the Minister aware that those of us who know the services of Mr. Davies to aviation know the invaluable work that he has done on the Board of B.E.A. without any fee or salary and the air services that he has provided for Wales with considerable financial loss to himself? Does the Minister not think, however, that this is something of a precedent for B.E.A. and that we ought to know rather more about the details of this transaction? Also, is he satisfied that the public interest is covered?

Mr. Watkinson: I am grateful to the hon. Gentleman for what he has said about Mr. Kenneth Davies, because as he knows and as I know his financial interest in this matter has probably cost him a good deal of money. There is no question of gain so far as he is concerned. As regards the second part of the hon. Gentleman's supplementary question, I was fully consulted by Lord Douglas, who is Chairman of B.E.A., on this acquisition, which was beneficial both to Wales and B.E.A. It was on that basis that I said in my Answer that I was fully satisfied.

Sir A. V. Harvey: Would the Minister agree that the more the Corporations get together with the independent operators

and enlarge British civil aviation, the better it will be for the country?

Mr. Watkinson: Yes, I quite agree.

Mr. Beswick: May I press the Minister on this matter? Although there is a 33 per cent. public shareholding, only one director has been appointed, and he has no direct responsibility at all. Does the Minister think that the public interest is safeguarded in this matter in view of the fact that public money is being provided?

Mr. Watkinson: Yes, I do, and I have said so.

B.O.A.C. Associated Companies Limited

Mr. Beswick: asked the Minister of Transport and Civil Aviation whether he will give the number of companies in which the British Overseas Airways Corporation Holdings Limited now has an interest, the total liability represented by these holdings, and the number of directors on the board of the British Overseas Airways Corporation Holdings Limited who are not responsible, directly or indirectly, to him.

Mr. Watkinson: I take it the hon. Member is referring to B.O.A.C. Associated Companies Limited. This company holds interests in eighteen subsidiary and associate companies. The total liability represented by these holdings is £11,810,980. All the directors of the company are directly, or indirectly, responsible to me.

Mr. Beswick: Is this not another example of the way in which there is increasingly remote control of interests that are being financed by public money? In addition, is there not private money in many of these companies, and are there not also directors appointed to this B.O.A.C. Holdings Company but not by the Minister? Is he again satisfied that the responsibility to Parliament is clearly established?

Mr. Watkinson: The first point in answer to that question is that the Corporations have to run themselves in a sensible, practical way as competitive businesses, and I support them in that. The House may like to know that I have received an assurance from the Chairman of B.O.A.C. that in any action proposed by the company my Ministry will


be consulted and its approval obtained in exactly the same way as if the action were being taken by B.O.A.C. itself.

Oral Answers to Questions — MINISTRY OF DEFENCE

British Forces, United States (Reciprocal Benefits)

Mr. E. Johnson: asked the Minister of Defence what benefits have been received since 1946 by members of Her Majesty's Forces serving in the United States of America which correspond to those provided under the National Health Service to members of the United States Forces serving in the United Kingdom.

The Minister of Defence (Mr. Duncan Sandys): Members of Her Majesty's Forces serving in the United States of America and their dependants receive medical treatment from the Medical Services of the United States Forces, wherever such facilities are available.

Mr. Johnson: Do members of Her Majesty's Forces serving in the United States receive tax-free petrol in the same way as American forces in this country?

Mr. Sandys: I was asked how these benefits corresponded with the benefits under the National Health Service. I know of no petrol-free arrangements under that Service.

Mr. Fernyhough: Can the right hon. Gentleman say what happens to British personnel where the services are not available? In his reply to the hon. Gentleman he said where the service was available. Will he tell us what happens to British personnel where the service is not available? Do they have to pay for it themselves?

Mr. Sandys: Yes, Sir. They have to pay for it.

National Service Men (Pay)

Mr. Fernyhough: asked the Minister of Defence (1) if he is aware of the need for an improvement in the basic pay of National Service men; and what steps he proposes to take to meet this situation;
(2) if he will increase the pay of National Service men for the last six months of their service so as to bring it into line with that of Regular Service men.

Mr. Chetwynd: asked the Minister of Defence whether he will increase the pay of the National Service man by the same amount as was deducted from his pay recently to meet the increased National Insurance contributions.

Mr. Sandys: I do not consider that there is justification for increasing the pay of National Service men.

Mr. Fernyhough: But is the right hon. Gentleman aware that this shows a complete indifference to a very legitimate grievance? Is he also aware that when the present National Service Act came into operation the basic pay was 28s.? Is he further aware that to have purchasing power of that amount today, 42s. 8d. would be needed, and since only 3s. 6d. has been added to the 28s., the basic pay of National Service men in 1958 as compared with 1948 is 11s. 2d. less than it ought to be, and that if he cannot allow them to get on he ought at least to allow them to maintain the 1948 position?

Mr. Sandys: I am sorry, perhaps my arithmetic is not so agile as that of the hon. Gentleman, but I cannot follow all those calculations. In so far as there is discrimination between the pay of National Service men and Regulars, that discrimination was started by the party opposite when they were in office.

Mr. Chetwynd: Is the right hon. Gentleman aware that the National Service men are suffering a particular hardship in that not only have they not had an increase in pay, but by the increase in National Insurance contribution which is deducted from their pay they are about the only section of the community at present which has suffered a relative decline in pay over the last few years?

Mr. Sandys: If the hon. Gentleman is referring to the increase in the National Health contribution—

Mr. Chetwynd: No. the National Insurance contribution.

Mr. Sandys: The National Insurance contribution, of course, also applies to people outside the Services. It has never been the practice to adjust pay to meet isolated changes in the cost of living. On the general question, I consider that a man who voluntarily commits himself to a long period of service in the Forces,


and intends to make a career in them, is entitled to a higher rate of pay than those who join for only two years.

Mr. Fernyhough: In view of the unsatisfactory nature of the reply, I beg to give notice that I will raise this matter on the Adjournment at the earliest possible moment.

Publication (Article)

Mr. Harold Davies: asked the Minister of Defence if he will seek information from the General Secretary of the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation on the policy of the Organisation in relation to its official publication "General Military Review", in view of the nature of the article in the issue for October, 1957, by Captain D.J. Goodspeed, advocating judicious assassination; and if he will withhold further grants to this organisation until satisfactory guarantees about the policy in regard to this publication are obtained.

Mr. Sandys: This is an independent publication for which N.A.T.O. has no responsibility.

Mr. Davies: If N.A.T.O. has no responsibility, has not the Minister or this Government some control, due to the fact that Field Marshal Sir Gerald Templer, General Norstad, Commander Speidel, and most of the fifteen leading N.A.T.O. commanders are on the Committee of Patronage, and that General Twining says he is honoured to be upon it? Is it now part of our policy to use the coup d'etat as a method of military tactics during peace, and does not the Minister think it is foolish, cruel and unkind to Eastern Europe to try to start subversive movements and then leave them adrift because no great Power will go to their help for fear of a Third World War? Will he please put that point forward to the writers of irresponsible articles such as this?

Mr. Sandys: I believe I am right in saying that many hon. Members have agreed to be patrons of all sorts of societies and organisations about which they know very little. I have just glanced at the article, and I am reassured to read in it that, in the opinion of the writer, democratic politicians are not worth assassinating.

Mr. Davies: In view of the unsatisfactory nature of that reply, I beg to give notice that I will raise the matter on the Adjournment at the first opportunity.

Aircraft and Missiles (Supply, Maintenance and Operation)

Mr. de Freitas: asked the Minister of Defence (1) what study he is making of the overlapping between the Royal Air Force and the other Services in the supply, maintenance and operation of missiles;
(2) what study he is making of the overlapping between the Royal Air Force and the other Services in the supply, maintenance and operation of aircraft.

Mr. Sandys: I am not aware of any appreciable overlapping.

Mr. de Freitas: Whilst I am delighted to hear that from the Minister, is it not a fact that if all three Services use similar missiles, in certain cases even identical missiles, there is at least a case now for amalgamation of the technical services involved?

Mr. Sandys: I do not quite understand what the hon. Gentleman is after, although I am glad he was delighted by my first reply. Missiles are supplied by a single Department, the Ministry of Supply, so there is no overlapping there. As regards maintenance, they are maintained to a very small extent, because they are highly technical, by the units which operate them. Where any major maintenance or repair is involved, the plan is that they shall be returned to the manufacturers.

Italy and Germany (Minister's Visit)

Mr. Biggs-Davison: asked the Minister of Defence whether he will make a statement about his recent visit to certain Western European capitals.

Mr. Sandys: At the invitation of the Italian and German Ministers of Defence, I recently paid visits to Rome and Bonn for an exchange of views on defence matters of common concern. At both meetings, one of the principal topics of discussion was that of closer co-operation on research, development and production of weapons and military equipment. In each case, we reached the conclusion that the time had come to bring together the various bi-lateral and tri-lateral


arrangements which have grown up during the past year between various European countries, and to put them on to a multi-lateral basis, within the framework of the Western European Union. It was agreed that the opportunity of the forthcoming meeting of N.A.T.O. Defence Ministers in Paris should be taken to put this proposal to the other member states of the Western European Union.
Before this meeting I shall, at the invita1 ion of the French Defence Minister, be having similar discussions with him in Paris.

Mr. Biggs-Davison: Whilst thanking my right hon. Friend for that information, may I ask him whether he is satisfied that the fullest use is being made of Western European Union, because it would seem that this organisation is becoming of increasing importance to the security of Britain and of Europe as the range of missiles increases and disengagement becomes a possibility?

Mr. Sandys: I agree with my hon. Friend. We should try to make Western European Union more of a reality. I feel that the proposals I have just announced, if they are approved by the other member States, will increase the effectiveness and usefulness of the Western European Union organisation.

Mr. Woodburn: Would the right hon. Gentleman impress on the French and other Governments the desirability of some economic co-operation, since we cannot very well have military cooperation without economic co-operation, which seems to be in jeopardy just now?

Mr. Sandys: I cannot go into the question of Free Trade Areas and things of that kind in answer to this Question. As regards the military aspect, closer co-operation, joint planning and allocation of tasks within the sphere of research, development and especially production will, of course, mean closer economic co-operation.

Mr. Chetwynd: Did the Minister get any satisfaction from the German Government on the question of support costs for our troops in Germany?

Mr. Sandys: Although that is not outside the scope of the Question, I think I have made it clear that that was not one of the subjects on the agenda for

our meeting, although it would have been impossible to have a two days' meeting with the German Minister without touching on that topic. This question is now before the N.A.T.O. Council in Paris, and we think that is where it should be handled.

Mr. Emrys Hughes: asked the Minister of Defence what was the purpose of his recent visit to Berlin.

Mr. Sandys: I went to Berlin to see some of the British units stationed there.

Mr. Hughes: Did the Minister see the damage which is still very obvious in Berlin? Is he aware of the feeling in Berlin that, if the East and West want to commit suicide, they should commit suicide somewhere other than in Berlin?

Mr. Sandys: There is no desire to commit suicide anywhere. One of the most striking things in going to Berlin by air is the extent of the devastation which still exists on the Eastern side and the extent of the reconstruction on the Western side.

Mr. Hughes: If the Minister went by air, did he not also see that there was considerable construction on the Eastern side?

An Hon. Member: Concentration camps.

Mr. Sandys: I am glad the hon. Member is an admirer of the Stalin Allee.

Mr. Emrys Hughes: asked the Minister of Defence to what extent he discussed the question of Germany being allowed to manufacture and use nuclear weapons in Western Germany during his recent visit to Germany; and if he will make a statement.

Mr. Sandys: This subject was not discussed.

Mr. Hughes: When the Minister was in Germany, was he made aware of the great strength of public feeling in Germany against the use of nuclear tactical weapons? Did he by any chance attend the big demonstration at Frankfurt where there was displayed a banner, "Better active than radioactive"? Does he not think that that is representative of the feeling of modern Germany?

Mr. Sandys: As a member of Her Majesty's Government, I shall certainly


not comment on public opinion in Germany about a controversial political issue. The hon. Member is as good a judge of the value of demonstrations as I am.

N.A.T.O. (Special Science Committee)

Mr. Stonehouse: asked the Minister of Defence what representatives Her Majesty's Government have on the Special Science Committee of the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation meeting in Paris; to what extent the hazards of radiation from the experimentation with nuclear weapons are being discussed; and with what results.

Mr. Sandys: The United Kingdom has one representative on this Committee. It has not discussed radiation hazards.

Mr. Stonehouse: Will this Special Science Committee be discussing the scientific limitations of tactical atomic arms, and will it have access to the results of the mock atomic war which the United States Seventh Army has just conducted?

Mr. Sandys: Perhaps the hon. Member would put that question on the Order Paper.

Members (Defence Conversations)

Mr. Shinwell: asked the Minister of Defence what talks he has had with hon. Members on the Government side of the House on the subject of defence; to what extent they have been furnished with information of a confidential character; and what similar facilities will be provided for other hon. Members.

Mr. Sandys: I have, at different times, had private talks with hon. Members on both sides of the House who have asked to see me; and I have given them such confidential information as I thought appropriate.

Mr. Shinwell: Does the right hon. Gentleman propose to proceed with these conversations, if he is asked by hon. Members from either side of the House, and to discuss information about defence? Will he see them at any time?

Mr. Sandys: I am always completely accessible.

Bacteriological Warfare

Mr. Emrys Hughes: asked the Minister of Defence if he proposes to continue preparations in respect of bacteriological warfare.

Mr. Sandys: For defensive purposes, it is necessary to continue research into possible methods of bacteriological warfare.

Mr. Hughes: Does the Minister recollect that about a year ago he gave me an assurance that he would examine this branch of so-called defence with a view to economy? Can he tell us what its purpose is and whether it is necessary after dropping H-bombs to drop bacteria?

Mr. Sandys: I cannot put myself into the mind of a possible aggressor, but an attack by bacteriological methods is not something which any responsible Government could altogether ignore.

Dr. Summerskill: Does the right hon. Gentleman's Answer mean that he is merely doing research into the antidotes for bacteriological warfare?

Mr. Sandys: The purpose of the research is defensive, but in order to study defensive methods one has to study what the other fellow can do to you.

Mr. Hughes: In view of the unsatisfactory nature of that Answer, I beg to give notice that I will raise the matter on the Adjournment.

Hertford British Hospital, Paris

Mr. G. Jeger: asked the Minister of Defence how many staff are employed at the Hertford British Hospital in Paris; what has been the average number of patients treated per week in the hospital since it was reopened in May, 1957; and what is the weekly cost of maintaining the hospital.

Mr. Sandys: The number of staff is 100. The weekly average number of patients is 74. Since the hospital opened less than a year ago, I cannot give a reliable figure of cost.

Mr. Jeger: Does the right hon. Gentleman think that this hospital is an economic proposition? Would it not be far better to make arrangements with either a French or American hospital in Paris for the treatment of British patients,


or would it not be even better to fly such patients back home for treatment in Britain?

Mr. Sandys: It is difficult to say of a hospital what is an economic proposition. I do not know exactly what the hon. Member has in mind. Whether it is run economically is another matter and something which is now before the Public Accounts Committee, and I think that the House will wish me to await that Committee's Report before commenting.

N.A.T.O. Countries (Tactical Atomic Weapons)

Mr. E. Fletcher: asked the Minister of Defence whether it is the present policy of the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation that all forces under the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation command should be equipped with tactical atomic weapons.

Mr. Sandys: It is obviously desirable that the forces of the Alliance should be equipped with whatever weapons are most appropriate to discharge their tasks effectively. With regard to tactical atomic weapons, the military authorities of N.A.T.O. are at present considering what advice they should give to the Governments concerned.

Mr. Fletcher: Is it correct that it is part of the present N.A.T.O. policy that all N.A.T.O. forces, including German forces, should be trained in the use of such dual-purpose weapons as the Matador, which can have either conventional or nuclear warheads?

Mr. Sandys: I do not think the hon. Member is correct. The position is as I stated it. It is the policy of N.A.T.O. that the forces should be equipped with whatever is most effective for their task in the particular area in which they are. The question as to whether they should use atomic weapons is one in the first place for the Supreme Commander and his staff and is then subject to agreement by each of the Governments of the countries concerned. The hon. Member referred to Germany. Germany is one of our allies in N.A.T.O. and, subject to the military considerations to which I have referred, we want her forces to make the most effective contribution possible to our common defence.

Mr. Strachey: If, as the Minister says, the North Atlantic Council is still considering this matter, was it not rather unfortunate that the Supreme Commander should have recently made a statement which seemed to prejudge the question as to whether German forces were immediately to be armed with these weapons?

Mr. Sandys: Generals make so many speeches that I cannot follow them all.

Mr. Gaitskell: Does not the Minister agree that the question of supplying nuclear weapons to Germany is not purely military but also political? Is he aware that on this side of the House we feel very strongly that no further action should be taken in this matter until at least after summit talks have shown whether there is any possibility of disengagement in Europe?

Mr. Sandys: Disengagement is a geographical question. [Hon. MEMBER: "Oh."] I think the right hon. Gentleman understands. The question of the supply of weapons is a different matter. The right hon. Gentleman referred to the supply of weapons, the equipment of forces in Germany with weapons. That does not include only German forces. The problem of disengagement and the schemes which have been discussed have included the question not of just whether German forces should have nuclear weapons, but whether there should be nuclear weapons in Germany, even though operated by forces of other nationalities. That is an issue wider than that raised in the Question.

Mr. Gaitskell: Can the right hon. Gentleman give the assurance that no decision has yet been reached by N.A.T.O. on the question, and that the military advice has not yet been tendered? Will he give an assurance that the British Government will at least take into full consideration the political dangers, at this important moment of negotiations between East and West, of providing the German forces with nuclear weapons?

Mr. Sandys: This is a very prickly question, as the right hon. Gentleman knows. I should not like to give an answer off-the-cuff on a matter of that kind.

Mr. Shinwell: Would the right hon. Gentleman make this point clear?


Apparently, General Norstad, the Supreme Commander, did make a statement to the effect that tactical atomic weapons would be supplied to Germany for the use of German forces, but the right hon. Gentleman has said in reply to a previous Question that this was a matter to be determined by the North Atlantic Treaty Council. Is there not some contradiction there, and do we understand that when General Norstad made his statement he made it entirely on his own responsibility and did prejudge a decision by N.A.T.O.?

Mr. Sandys: No. I have not got the documents in front of me, but I think I am right in saying that a decision in principle was taken by the N.A.T.O. meeting of Heads of Governments last December in Paris to the effect that N.A.T.O. forces should, where the Supreme Commander thought it appropriate and subject to the agreement of the Governments concerned, be supplied with nuclear weapons. Since these, in fact, will all be American nuclear warheads, the warheads will be controlled by the United States commander concerned.

BUSINESS OF THE HOUSE

Mr. Gaitskell: May I ask the Leader of the House whether he will state the business for the first week after the Easter Recess?

The Secretary of State for the Home Department and Lord Privy Seal (Mr. R. A. Butler): Yes, Sir. The business for the first week after the Easter Recess will be as follows:
TUESDAY, 15TH APRIL—My right hon. Friend the Chancellor of the Exchequer will open his Budget.
WEDNESDAY, 16TH APRIL and THURSDAY, 17TH APRIL—General debate on the Budget Resolutions and the Economic Situation, which will be continued and brought to a conclusion on Monday, 21st April.
FRIDAY, 18TH APRIL—Consideration Of Private Members' Bills.

RENT ACT, 1957

The Minister of Housing and Local Government and Minister for Welsh Affairs (Mr. Henry Brooke): With permission, Mr. Speaker, I should like to make a statement.
Nine months having passed since the Rent Act came into operation, my right hon. Friend the Secretary of State for Scotland and I have been taking stock of the working of the Act, and I now wish to make a statement on the position on his behalf as well as my own.
The increased rents allowed for houses which remain under control are enabling landlords to put them into proper repair, and all over the country this part of the Act is well on the way to achieving its object of preserving the houses and preventing future slums. Over the country at large the decontrol provisions of the Act are also operating without serious difficulty, and even in a few areas which are more difficult, such as London, very large numbers of tenants have already been able to enter into new agreements on reasonable terms or have succeeded for themselves in making other arrangements. [An HON. MEMBER: "In Hamp-stead?"] Thus, by bringing about better use of under-occupied accommodation, the second object of the Act has been accomplished, and the Government do not intend to repeal or amend it.
Measures imperative in the national interest to combat inflation have, I know, made it harder for some decontrolled tenants wishing to buy a house for themselves. It is also beyond doubt that there would have been nowhere near so many notices to quit served but for the Labour Party's threat of municipalisation. [HON. MEMBERS: "Oh."] Nevertheless, out of the 800,000 households whose tenancies have been decontrolled, the proportion who may not have solved their housing problem by October and may, therefore, be liable to eviction, seems likely to be small.

Mr. Scholefield Allen: On a point of order. Is it in order—

Lieut. - Colonel Bromley - Davenport: Take your hands out of your pockets.

Mr. Scholefield Allen: Is it in order for a Minister to make a political speech when giving a factual statement of the intentions of the Government?

Mr. Speaker: The Minister has said nothing out of order in his statement.

Mr. Brooke: But these families will be concentrated in a few areas, and the greater part of them are likely to be elderly people with limited means—the type of people whose problems, naturally, take longer to solve, and who might be exposed to severe hardship if they were not given a little more time to find suitable accommodation within their means. Under the existing law the county court is powerless to hold up an order for possession for more than four weeks or so, even though the tenant may have nowhere to go.
The Government propose an amendment of the law of landlord and tenant so that in appropriate cases of decontrolled tenants the court may grant a rather longer delay before the landlord can regain possession, if the tenant can satisfy it on three matters—[HON. MEMBERS: "Resign."]—first, that he has done his best to reach a new agreement with his landlord, and failed; secondly, that he has made every reasonable effort to obtain other accommodation, and failed; and, thirdly, that immediate eviction would mean greater hardship to him than a limited postponement of vacant possession would mean to the landlord. Any postponement will be solely for the purpose of granting more time to find other accommodation, and after 6th October an increased rent will be payable. Corresponding provision will be made as regards the sheriff courts in Scotland.

Mr. Emrys Hughes: On a point of order. Am I not right in assuming that matters affecting Scotland are under the jurisdiction of the Secretary of State for Scotland, who has the responsibility? Should we not have a separate statement from the Secretary of State for Scotland?

Mr. Speaker: There is no point of order in that. The Minister began by saying that he was making the statement on behalf of his right hon. Friend the Secretary of State for Scotland as well as himself.

Mr. Brooke: That is so, Mr. Speaker.
The necessary Measure, which will be of temporary duration and will apply to Scotland as well as to England and Wales, will be introduced immediately after the Easter Recess and passed into law without delay. The Government have declared

their determination that the objects of the Rent Act shall be achieved, and also that they shall be achieved in a fair and reasonable manner. Both these pledges we intend to fulfil.

Mr. Mitchison: Is the right hon. Gentleman aware that we do not accept the statement of his objects in relation to the Rent Act and, further, that we do not propose to argue in detail about a completely inaccurate and wholly incomplete statement of its present effects? Perhaps he had better bring a bell next time he intends to make that sort of statement.
Is the right hon. Gentleman also aware that the Labour Party's plans for dealing with the housing situation came out before, and not after, the Government saw fit to introduce the Rent Bill? Is he still further aware that we welcome his conversion to the proposals which my hon. Friend the Member for Willesden, East (Mr. Orbach) sought leave to introduce by way of a Ten Minutes Rule Bill on 11th February, and that we wonder why the right hon. Gentleman voted against it? As for legislation, we must reserve our comments until it appears.

Mr. Brooke: This proposal is wholly distinct from the Bill proposed to be brought in by the hon. Member for Willesden, East (Mr. Orbach). I am well aware that the Opposition would not have had the courage to tackle the rent situation.

Mr. Woodburn: The Minister referred to the proposal as being "of temporary duration." How long is that temporary duration to be? Is he aware that the old people to whom he refers have a horror of going near courts of law? Does he not consider that it would be reasonable for rent tribunals to deal with this question, upon a basis of justice?

Mr. Brooke: I would ask the right hon. Gentleman to await the terms of the Bill which will be presented to the House.

Mr. Dudley Williams: Is my right hon. Friend aware that his statement will cause great disappointment to the Opposition, because they will not get the evictions that they so ardently want next October?

Mr. Lindgren: The Minister has referred to cases which go to the county courts. Can he help those of us who are laymen, in the argument which is now proceeding among lawyers, on the question whether, under the Rent Act, it is


necessary for a landlord to go to a county court to obtain possession, or whether he can evict without a court order?

Mr. Brooke: The Bill will provide that the landlord will need to obtain an order of the court.

Sir R. Jennings: Is the Minister aware that his statement will be acclaimed throughout the country as a most humane statement?—[Laughter.] I can wait. Is he aware that his statement will be acclaimed throughout the country—[HON. MEMBERS: "Take your hands out of your pockets."]—as a great humane statement and, further, that the Labour Party—[Interruption.]—will be stopped—[Interruption.]

Mr. Speaker: Order. I must remind the House that this is not the way to behave.

Sir R. Jennings: Is my right hon. Friend further aware that the Labour Party will now be stopped from making party political capital out of the Rent Act?

Mr. E. Fletcher: Is the Minister aware that his most provocative statement will do nothing to alleviate the immense amount of hardship which the Rent Act has caused? Will he confirm that his proposed amending legislation will apply to all tenants, and not merely to elderly tenants?

Mr. Brooke: It will apply to tenants who can satisfy the three tests that I have indicated. It will be mostly the elderly tenants who are likely to be able to satisfy them.

Mr. Robert Jenkins: Is my right hon. Friend aware that the statement that he has made today—[HON.MEMBERS: "Take your hands out of your pockets."]—is in accordance with the character that he has achieved in London in the last twenty or thirty years as a local government expert? Further, may I say this to him—[HON. MEMBERS: "No."] Is he aware that he has carried out his promise, contained in the speech he made in Hampstead a short time ago, to deal with the situation as and when he was satisfied that it needed dealing with? Is he also aware that many hon. Members on both sides of the House who have been worried about the effect of the eviction provisions of the Rent Act feel a great deal of confidence in the statement that he has made?

Mr. Brooke: I am concerned to stand by the principles of the Rent Act and to protect those individuals who need protection.

Mr. T. Fraser: Does the Secretary of State, speaking for Scotland, subscribe to that part of the statement made by the Minister which says that houses which remain controlled and have had a rent increase are now being repaired by the landlords? If he does subscribe to that, will he tell us from where he has obtained the evidence in support of that? In that part of the statement which concerns Scotland, is the Secretary of State merely following his right hon. Friend, as he has done hitherto? Is his part of the statement the result of his examination of the problem, or of the result at Kelvingrove?

The Secretary of State for Scotland (Mr. John Maclay): Broadly speaking, I agree precisely with what the Minister said in the earlier part of his statement. There are slightly different emphases in Scotland in relation to the question of how much work has been done in the repair of houses but, broadly speaking, the process is going on effectively in Scotland.
I can assure the hon. Member for Hamilton (Mr. T. Fraser) that I have been studying this matter very closely ever since I made speeches in Greenock, Port Glasgow and two other places, saying that I was watching what was happening. I have been in close touch with my right hon. Friend and I entirely agree with what is proposed.

Mr. H. Morrison: Does the Minister appreciate that the announcement which he has made this afternoon, limited though it is, is, nevertheless, an admission that many of the Labour Party's criticisms of his Rent Act were legitimate, and that many people were likely to be evicted in October in a hurry? Will he now confess that the Labour Party was right in being highly critical of many of the provisions of his Rent Act?

Mr. Brooke: No, Sir. If the right hon. Gentleman will read the first speech that I made about the Rent Act after I became Minister, he will see that I laid stress upon the importance of finding the right measures to ease and smooth the transition. The failure of the Labour Party is that it was never prepared to face the rent problem at all.

Mr. Mitchison: Can the right hon. Gentleman say for how long will a county court be able to stay these evictions?

Mr. Brooke: I would ask the hon. and learned Member to await the provisions of the Bill.

Mr. Mitchison: Why?

Mr. Page: Is it not a fact that this very satisfactory statement relates to what is quite a narrow point of law? Has not the county court always had discretion to suspend an order for possession when a controlled house has become decontrolled, and was not there some doubt about it under the Act? Has not my right hon. Friend resolved that doubt in favour of the tenant?
May I ask my right hon. Friend to take the opportunity to remind local authorities that, to a great extent, the solution of these hard cases is in their hands—[HON. MEMBERS: "Oh."]—if they would make way for the really needy cases by terminating the tenancies of council house tenants who have an income of more than £30 a week?

Mr. Brooke: Local authorities certainly have an important part to play in the fulfilment of their housing obligations. I am advised that at present the county court can give a stay of possession for four weeks, but not longer. The Bill will enable the county court, in proper cases, to give a longer stay.

Mr. Shinwell: Can the right hon. Gentleman say whether the statement he has just made is to be the final announcement on the proposed amendment of the Rent Act, or has he any further amendments in contemplation?

Mr. Brooke: No, Sir. The Bill will incorporate the Government's proposals. It will then be open to Parliamentary debate.

Several Hon. Members: rose—

Mr. Speaker: Order. We must await the issue of the Bill.

BILLS PRESENTED

CORPORATION OF THE SONS OF THE CLERGY CHARITIES

Bill to confirm a Scheme of the Charity Commissioners for the application or management of certain Charities known

as the Corporation of the Sons of the Clergy, presented by Sir Hugh Linstead; read the First time; to be read a Second time upon Wednesday, 16th April, and to be printed. [Bill 94.]

READING ALMSHOUSES AND MUNICIPAL CHARITIES

Bill to confirm a Scheme of the Charity Commissioners for the application or management of certain Charities in the County Borough of Reading, presented by Sir Hugh Linstead; read the First time; to be read a Second time upon Wednesday, 16th April, and to be printed. [Bill 95.]

ROYAL INSTITUTION OF GREAT BRITAIN CHARITY

Bill to confirm a Scheme of the Charity Commissioners for the application or management of the General Charity known as the Royal Institution of Great Britain, presented by Sir Hugh Linstead; read the First time; to be read a Second time upon Wednesday, 16th April, and to be printed. [Bill 96.]

ST. JAMES'S DWELLINGS CHARITY

Bill to confirm a Scheme of the Charity Commissioners for the application or management of the St. James's Dwellings Charity in the City of Westminster, presented by Sir Hugh Linstead; read the First time; to be read a Second time upon Wednesday, 16th April, and to be printed. [Bill 97.]

BUSINESS OF THE HOUSE

Proceedings on Government Business exempted, at this day's Sitting, from the provisions of Standing Order No. 1 (Sittings of the House).—[Mr. R. A. Butler.]

SITTINGS OF THE HOUSE

House to meet Tomorrow at Eleven o'clock; no Questions to be taken after Twelve o'clock; and at Five o'clock Mr. Speaker to adjourn the House without putting any Question.—[Mr. R. A.
Butler.]

ADJOURNMENT (EASTER)

House, at its rising Tomorrow, to adjourn till Tuesday. 15th April.—[Mr. R. A. Butler.]

Orders of the Day — LIFE PEERAGES BILL [Lords]

Order for Third Reading read.

3.53p.m.

The Secretary of State for the Home Department and Lord Privy Seal (Mr. R. A. Butler): I beg to move, That the Bill be now read the Third time.
The House will remember that at the conclusion of the previous stage in our discussion of the Bill it was agreed that further general discussion should not take place on Clause 1, on the Question, That the Clause stand part of the Bill, but that an opportunity should be given to raise any further issues during the Third Reading debate. This opportunity is, therefore, afforded for any further discussion on the general principles of the Bill, although, however, upon Third Reading it is incumbent upon me, according to the rules of order, to adhere strictly to the terms of the Bill. The Bill is a very short one, and it will be somewhat difficult for me to expand my remarks unduly, as I shall be obliged to restrict my observations to the comparatively small compass of the Bill. The House will probably be ready to come to a conclusion upon the Bill after hearing the animadversions which hon. Members may wish to make.
We had a variety of views advanced during our discussions. We had views from either extreme. We heard some erudite constitutional observations from the hon. Member for Wolverhampton, South-West (Mr. Powell) and the forthright abolitionism of the hon. Lady the Member for Cannock (Miss Lee). We heard various points of view advanced by hon. Members which enlivened our debates. I think I may also say that at least the preliminary portion of the speech of the right hon. Member for Ebbw Vale (Mr. Bevan) was, in its literary quality—I am not referring to its political quality—one of the best that we have recently heard. The hon. Member for Oldham, West (Mr. Hale) made a considerable contribution to our debates; its character may be described as light yet pervading.
The hon. Member for Northfield (Mr. Chapman) made a contribution about which I wish to remind hon. Members. He, as do the Government, believes in the essential need for a second Chamber,

and for reasons which, I believe, would appeal to most of us. The majority of us believe that a second Chamber has a vital part to play in its constitutional rôle of revising legislation. The second reason for a second Chamber was voiced by the hon. Member for Northfield who, I notice, is sitting next to the hon. Member for Torrington (Mr. Bonham-Carter), and I will quote his words:
… the type of discussion that goes on in the House of Lords should go on for the good of the country."—[OFFICIAL REPORT, 13th February, 1958; Vol. 582, c. 641.]
I do not think that anybody could cavil at that observation, or object to it.
Some hon. Members have cried that we should end the House of Lords—"Away with the second Chamber." Let me say at once that Her Majesty's Government wholly and totally reject that view. It would not be in the interests of the Constitution; it would not be in the interests of the preservation of our liberties; it would not be in the interests of the efficiency of the laws which we produce for the benefit of our fellow citizens. When I moved the Motion for the Second Reading I did not claim that the present Upper House, or other place, is an ideal second Chamber. I do not think that I have the right to try to prove that. But the work it has achieved and the manner in which, as we have claimed during our discussions, it has exercised its powers, prove that it has behaved in a reasonable way and added to the dignity and efficiency of our public life. We now claim that its constitution, and its power to help, will be improved by the addition of life peers and peeresses as is provided for under the Bill. At any rate, we are not prepared to contemplate a single-Chamber Government.
On the Second Reading I referred to the Wensleydale decision. On looking back on our debates, and upon history, it would appear that the simplest way to describe this Bill would be to say that it is a reversal of the Wensleydale decision, and not very much else. Probably there is no restriction in law on the right of the Crown to create life peers. The restriction is on the creation of life peers with a right to sit and speak in Parliament. The object of the Bill—the Third Reading of which we now celebrate, if I may use that term—is a reversal of the original Wensleydale decision in respect of a seat and voice in another place.
Going back to our discussions, we do not think that there should be any limitation on the number of life peers. There is no limitation on the number of hereditary peers and in framing the Bill we have not thought that there should be any limitation on the number of life peers. We had a discussion on another feature of the Bill, to which it would be in order to refer on Third Reading, the decision to create, or give the power to create, life peeresses. We had a discussion during the Committee stage proceedings, to which it would not be in order to refer on Third Reading, about why hereditary peeresses cannot themselves, under the terms of the Bill, sit in another place. As I said in that discussion, this Bill is a simple Measure, confined solely to the purposes written on the face of the Bill.

Mr. Emrys Hughes: As the Bill allows life peeresses in the House of Lords, does the right hon. Gentleman not think that it will be a good idea to call the place "The House of Ladies and Lords"?

Mr. Butler: The hon. Member can call it what he likes. Such a very agreeable and euphonious expression falling from his lips would be rare, and as such I should prefer it. If the hon. Member wishes to use that as a constitutional term he can have the special distinction of using that expression himself. He will thereby preserve his natural distinction and individuality in our own Chamber.
There is no question about giving power to hereditary peeresses to sit in another place. This Bill, in its single operative Clause, gives power only for the creation of life peers and peeresses. I need not go into the problems of hereditary peeresses, because that is not written into the Bill and would be out of order on a Third Reading debate. Let me say, in passing, that those who are life peeresses by right or by grant were not originally intended to have a seat or voice in Parliament. We saw no reason why, in the small scope of the Bill, we should give them that right on this occasion.
It is difficult to find fresh argument in support of the Third Reading. I would rehearse some of the arguments to the contrary employed by hon. Members who spoke from the other side of the House. The claim has been made that the Bill

will bolster up the hereditary peerage. I do not take that view. I do not think it will make any particular difference to the hereditary peerage. If, as we hope, the Swinton proposals, as they are called, are brought in, it will be likely that the number of peers in another place will be more nearly equivalent to the number who now do the work there. If so, that would be a satisfactory and truly typically British way of achieving the right balance and form of working. There is no intention to bolster up the hereditary peerage by the Bill.
Another argument by critics of the Bill was that it would increase the prestige of another place and make it more powerful. The Bill does not alter the powers of another place nor is it intended to alter them. Nor have we at present anything to propose with a view to altering those powers. I hope that the Bill will make another place operate more efficiently by the opportunity given to those whom I would describe as servants of the State, whether men or women, to take their part in the Legislature as life peers, and not to assume the dignity and perpetuation of the hereditary peerage.
The Bill relies upon the simple proposition that there are independent men and women who would regard it as an honour and privilege to serve the State in the Legislature in another place. It is not intended that the choice of those selected would be confined to one party or to politicians. I have explained in the course of the discussions that the objective is that the Prime Minister of the day should have the constitutional position and right of making these appointments.

Mr. Eric Fletcher: Would not the Prime Minister make recommendations to Her Majesty?

Mr. Butler: I am grateful to the hon. Member for his constitutional correction. It will be for the Prime Minister, to make recommendations to Her Majesty, and when recommending someone who is not of his own political party he would consult the leaders of the party opposite to him or of the party not of his own colour. I have tried to make it clear, on this occasion and on previous occasions, that we cannot define exactly how that choice will be made. I do not believe that it would be right to tie the hands either of the present Prime Minister or of any


of his successors, of whatever political colour they may be. Their constitutional right to make these recommendations must be maintained. All we can say is that we consider there should be a chance for consultation with those of another party when politicians not of the party constituting the Government of the day are chosen.

Miss Jennie Lee: Does the right hon. Gentleman accept that when consultations are offered and are no accepted there would be no moral authority to nominate either peers or peeresses?

Mr. Butler: That is precisely why I would not like to define the position ahead. There is certainly no intention of forcing a choice upon anybody. There is no question, either, of making patronising observations about the Bill helping the party opposite. I have never tried to do that, or to suggest that it is obligatory upon anybody, either of the party opposite or of this party, to become a life peer. We believe that it will be open to men and women who will want to serve as life peers or peeresses. The Bill will give the Prime Minister of the day the opportunity to appoint them. There can be no certainty how the operation of the Bill would be worked out.
If the choice of life peers is not political, that is to say, is a choice of persons outside the political world, it would obviously be reasonable for the Prime Minister of the day to have the opportunity of finding out such persons whom he would recommend to Her Majesty as potential life peers or peeresses, by his own sources of inquiry, much as he does today.
It was somewhat disappointing to the Government that, when the question of life peeresses came up, the hon. Lady the Member for Cannock, who has just asked me a question, thought fit with some of her hon. Friends to move an Amendment, which, I am glad to say, was ignominiously defeated with the aid of some of her own hon. Friends, suggesting that women should not be Members of another place under the Bill. That was a most unreasonable suggestion.
The right hon. Member for Lewisham, South (Mr. H. Morrison) himself, in a

moving speech, referred to the occasions in his public career when, as Home Secretary or otherwise, he had sponsored the cause of women. It is, if I may use the expression about the hon. Lady the Member for Cannock, somewhat antediluvian to suggest that when a Bill comes up in this year of grace, 1958, for the creation of life peeresses, proposing to treat women on an absolute equality with men in giving them the opportunity to serve in another place—

Miss Lee: Her Majesty's Opposition voted against the whole Bill, which meant voting against men peers as well as women peeresses. We are against life peerages, and we voted against both women and men being life peers.

Mr. Butler: I am aware of the position, which hon. Gentlemen opposite are quite at liberty to maintain. I was only saying that there was this differential, if I may borrow a term from the field of wage negotiations. It was extremely sad that the hon. Lady should have thought that if men were to go as peers, peeresses should not join them and be by their side. We regard that as a backward step on the part of the hon. Lady which will be noted by all women's organisations and by all the women in the country who wish to take a part in public affairs.
As I have said once or twice before in public, we live on a comparatively small island, and the more talent we can encourage from the ranks of women to join us in our councils the better it will be for the country. That is why the hon. Lady found herself for once, as a prominent leader of her own party, deserted by some of her own hon. Friends on this issue. It is the wish of the Government that men shall be created life peers as well as women life peeresses. I feel certain that there will be men and women who will come forward with interest to take up the opportunity offered by the Bill.
I would summarise the main case for the Bill by saying that it will enlarge the field of selection and, by making it possible to recommend the creation of life peers and peeresses, will provide, an adequate field of recruitment for another place. Secondly, the Bill will enable life peerages to be conferred on people of distinction—men and women widely


representative of the nation's life—and so enrich the quality of the debates in another place.

Mr. Frank Bowles: That applies to people who cannot or do not want to enter the House of Commons or have been rejected for membership of the House of Commons.

Mr. Butler: Not necessarily. It has always been a feature of the relationship between our two Houses that those who have served honourably in this House very often find it agreeable, honourable and convenient later to serve in another place. It by no means excludes the recommendation of Members of this House or Members outside the House. It does not restrict the field in any way.

Mr. Bowles: The right hon. Gentleman misunderstands me. He was referring not only to politicians but to people of reputation outside politics, people who had not tried to enter this House or did not want to enter it. Such people could go straight to another place.

Mr. Butler: Yes, but that also applies to the recommendation of the creation of hereditary peers today, and there is no difference in that respect. It is not a necessary credential for passage to another place that one should have passed through this place.

Mr. E. Fletcher: Is it intended that the committee which now investigates all honours before they are submitted to Her Majesty will apply equally to the proposed creation of life peerages?

Mr. Butler: I cannot give a specific answer to that, because I have not given the point my consideration before coming here. The hon. Member and the House may rest assured that the Prime Minister's decision will be exercised in such a way as not to do violence to any of the existing practices in relation to the conferment of honours. I do not know exactly what the machinery will be, but we will certainly look into the point which the hon. Member has made. I understand the right hon. and learned Member for Newport (Sir F. Soskice) to say that it is a good point, but it was not raised early in the debate and I can only give a guarantee as to the general manner in which these baronies will be conferred.
Those are the main reasons for the introduction of the Bill. I have thought

long and seriously about whether the Bill will help our Constitution to work better. I have anxiously considered whether any Bill referring to another place can improve upon the traditional growth of, first, the relations between one House and another and, secondly, the constitution of another place itself. It is legitimate to feel that legislation in our Constitution has not always been successful, and I have thought about that most seriously, but I and my right hon. and hon. Friends have come to the conclusion that the Bill reverts a decision which we feel was wrong—the Wensleydale decision.
It is typical of our Constitution and history that it should take all these years to reverse so simple a decision and to restore a position which was originally a feature of our Constitution—namely, the presence in another place of life peers. I need only mention the abbots who were in another place before the dissolution of the monasteries.

Mr. E. Fletcher: And abbesses.

Mr. Butler: It was always a feature of another place that life peers should sit in another place, and it is not a revolutionary proposal that we should revert to an earlier stage of our Constitution, when it was not only permissible but worked extremely well.
It would be out of order for me to refer to such questions as the payment of peers, their general subsistence, and the manner in which they conduct their duties, but if we can consider those problems, and can make the ultimate selection of life peers and peeresses assist in the working of another place, and if the Swinton Committee's rules are introduced under the House of Lords' own order of procedure, I think that we might see another place operating to our general satisfaction. There is no proposal to enlarge its powers. There is simply a proposal to make its revising qualities more efficient and more effective than they are today.
I believe that the Bill is in accordance with our traditions. I do not think that it is a revolutionary Measure, and I think it will help our Constitution and will be a slight addition to the grace, dignity and efficiency of another place.

4.16 p.m.

Sir Frank Soskice: As the Lord Privy Seal said, it is not very easy to debate this Bill on Third Reading because


the arguments for and against it have already been so fully stated and we are now confined strictly to the contents of the Bill.
The Lord Privy Seal did not make our task any easier at the beginning of his speech by informing the House that he could not give an answer to the many questions which have been put during the debates on the Bill, about how it will work and what the Government intend by it. Instead, he made what I must confess I thought was a not very creditable or skilful attempt to play politics by making an attack on my hon. Friend the Member for Cannock (Miss Lee). He called her Amendment antediluvian. My hon. Friend, by her Amendment, made it perfectly clear that what she intended was to have nothing to do with the Bill. She stated her view that the Bill was wholly antipathetic to her and that she wanted to dissociate herself, her hon. Friends and her sex from its provisions in their entirety.
I was a little surprised that the right hon. Gentleman was so unwise as to make that attack, in view of what he said a few moments ago about hereditary peeresses. If he means to play party politics on those lines he should have a better explanation of why he did not deal with the question of hereditary peeresses. It is no answer to say that they are not meant to be included in the Bill. We have only to read the two Clauses of the Bill to realise that for ourselves, and it has been stated many times before.
If I do not trespass beyond what you would consider legitimate to this debate, Mr. Speaker, may I point out to the Lord Privy Seal that the scope of the Bill in its original and in its present form was entirely within the Government's discretion, and that unless it was the Government's intention to exclude at any rate some women from membership of another place they could easily have included the hereditary peeresses within its scope. It is for that reason that I think that the Lord Privy Seal's attack on my hon. Friend was a very long way below his usual form. It seems to me that he leaves his flank peculiarly exposed.
I have indicated my discontent with the right hon. Gentleman for giving us no

information in answer to the many questions which we have put and which still remain unanswered. I thought that by the time we reached Third Reading the Lord Privy Seal, the Minister responsible for the Bill, would be able to give us some information about the numbers involved. Apparently he has not the remotest idea. I will not do him the discourtesy of suggesting that he has not thought of it; after all, it is an obvious point and it has been made over and over again.
I am bound to say that the Bill was originally presented to us in patronising terms. It certainly seemed to us that the terms were patronising, in that it was presented as a gift, as some kind of assistance to us. As we view it, its avowed and declared object is to galvanise into activity a House which, at present, can be defended only upon the basis that it is practically moribund. I said on Second Reading that we were asked to exchange a quiescent Conservative majority of the House of Lords for an active majority. I do not see that the Bill has any other purpose than that. If that is the sort of present that we are offered, then, as I pointed out, and as I venture to restate, we cannot be expected to be particularly delighted, and we are not, in fact, in the least delighted.
I again put the question so that, at long last, perhaps we may have an answer from the Government through the Secretary of State for Scotland, who is to wind up the debate: can he tell us something about the membership? Suppose the Government or the Prime Minister recommends the appointment of, say, 30 life peers. Are we really to suppose that the majority of those life peers will not be Conservatives?

Mr. Emrys Hughes: They may be Communists.

Sir F. Soskice: They could be anything. No one quite knows what this Government will do; they have zigzagged along for so long now. It may be, as one of my hon. Friends says, that they will appoint Communists or anybody else. I do not know.
However, I would rather think that they are much more likely to appoint good, solid, staunch Conservatives, and that the only difference between those life


peers whom Her Majesty will be recommended to create, and those other, hereditary peers, will be that the hereditary peers are apt to be a bit somnolent while the others will be particularly awake.
We have also asked whether this new, active breed of peers to sit in another place are to be paid, and all that we have heard from the Lord Privy Seal, in reply, is that he feared he would be out of order if he answered that question. Looking with fear and trepidation in your direction, Mr. Speaker, I venture to pose the question again to the Secretary of State for Scotland. So far, I have had no success.

Mr. Speaker: I feel goaded into saying that there is nothing in the Bill about the payment of peers.

Sir F. Soskice: I thought that I might provoke your displeasure, Mr. Speaker, and I am very sorry that I have.
While the Bill says nothing about the payment of life peers in the other place, it does speak of life peers and life peers must, as a matter of logic, I respectfully submit to you, Mr. Speaker, fall into one or the other of two categories: they are either paid life peers or they are unpaid life peers. I do not know whether you will allow me, in these circumstances, to put this question to the Secretary of State, that is to say, whether the category of life peers we are to see in the other place is to be that of the paid or the unpaid life peers?
If they should fall into the former category perhaps he would be so good as to say so and then to subdivide that category by saying roughly what type of payment will be made. I hope that I have not transgressed against your Ruling, Mr. Speaker, in putting this question. I wonder whether you will allow me to pursue that, very carefully and gingerly. Suppose that these life peers are to be in the former category, and that the Secretary of State did feel able to subdivide that category into various columns of payments which the life peers might receive, would he not then agree—the Lord Privy Seal told us nothing about this—that the objection which we have made to this, and which is still the objection—and this is very strictly related to the contents of the Bill and does not go outside it—does hold good, that the

Government are creating here a new field of highly undesirable patronage?
I personally cannot see any answer to that objection, and I am very anxious that it may be a well-founded objection since any Minister who has spoken in the debates on the Bill so far has not managed in the slightest degree to controvert it. One would have thought that by the time we had come to this stage of the Bill the Lord Privy Seal would have been able to have helped us by giving a vague hint, an idea, however vague, of what the Government's thinking is, if any thinking is done by the Government, of what that might be.
I should like the Secretary of State, always upon the assumption that this is in order, to be so good as to tell us what the Government have in mind about this. Are we to have this breed of life peers enjoying comfortable life pensions for doing—what? For sitting beside the rather less active peers there at the moment for part of the day only, not a very long part of the day? For part of the year only, not a very long part of the year? For doing one does not quite know what by way of safeguarding the Conservative Party?

Mr. Emrys Hughes: Or the Liberal Party.

Sir F. Soskice: I hope that the Secretary of State will be able at least to say that they have thought of this matter. Indeed, if the answer is that they are rather flummoxed by it perhaps we should at least think that some consolation, to know at least that it is a matter which has flummoxed them and not merely one which has not occurred to them.

The Secretary of State for Scotland (Mr. John Maclay): As the right hon. and learned Gentleman has managed to remain on his feet during this last part of this speech, perhaps he will be good enough to redefine those categories of which he spoke. Then, perhaps, when I get up later in the debate, if I stick to them I also shall be able to remain on my feet.

Sir F. Soskice: That is a pitiful cry for help, to which I am only too glad to respond.
The categories are the paid and the unpaid. I should like the right hon. Gentleman to subdivide the paid, if that


is the category in question, into various columns into which their payments may fall—whether their payments be £1 a year or £1,000 a year or £10,000 a year. I should have thought that temporary peers receiving £1,000 would have fallen into a different column category from one whose salary was £10,000 a year. I should like the Secretary of State to tell us about that.
I put this to him not flippantly in any way, because we on this side of the House have voiced the objection, to which we have had no answer, that this is a bad Bill for many reasons, including that reason, namely, that it will create a new field of patronage which is to be enjoyed by people who are to be appointed—I do not know upon what basis, because we have heard little about that, also—to be temporary peers in the House of Lords.

Mr. Bowles: Not temporary peers.

Sir F. Soskice: No, not temporary. I meant life peers.

Mr. Frederick Gough: The right hon. and learned Gentleman says that my right hon. Friend may be creating a dangerous form of patronage, and in deploying his argument he divided the life peers on the one side into those who are paid and, on the other, into those who are unpaid, and I think that in the middle there was a group of those who were half paid. Would he say whether the patronage is more dangerous in creating unpaid life peers or in creating paid life Peers?

Sir F. Soskice: I must invite the attention of the Lord Privy Seal to the harm that he has done. He has mystified his own hon. Friends, just as he has mystified us. The hon. Member has my very sincere sympathy. It is really very difficult to know what the Government mean to do.
I am sorry I called these life peers "temporary" peers. The Government propose to make it possible for the life peers to sit in the other place, and I was asking whether they would be subdivided into penfolds, according to whether they were or were not paid life peers. What I am simply saying is that, unintentionally, I have no doubt, we are putting in the hands of a future Prime Minister and

the present Prime Minister power to distribute largesse to a number of people—I do not know how many there are to be—who are to be invited to take their place in the House of Lords as life peers, and I am simply pointing out that, if a number of people are to be given—I will not say awarded, but given—life pensions, I am justified in describing that situation as one which amounts to the creation of a very highly undesirable field of patronage. That is the simple point which I put. I confess I am as mystified as the hon. Gentleman himself. I am sure that my hon. Friends have been mystified, and I am sincere in my expression of sympathy with the hon. Member.

Mr. Gough: I would assure the right hon. and learned Gentleman that I am not in the least mystified. It is he who is mystified, and, so far as I can see, he has mystified the House.

Sir F. Soskice: All I can say, then, is that if the hon. Member has the good fortune to catch your eye, Mr. Speaker, perhaps he can give us the information which the Lord Privy Seal cannot give us. We have been pressing the Lord Privy Seal for information as to whether these peers are to be paid. Even if the hon. Member is not mystified, we are mystified, because we do not know and, perhaps, therefore, the hon. Member, as I hope, will be able to enlighten our minds by telling us what the Lord Privy Seal has told him, whether they are to be paid and what they are to be paid.

Mr. Nigel Fisher: The logic of the argument of the party opposite seems to be not to have a second Chamber, for surely the power of patronage would be as great in making recommendations for the creation of unpaid life peers as in making recommendations for paid life peers.

Sir F. Soskice: If we were debating what the proper arrangements should be, the debate would range over a very wide area, and it would no doubt be couched in somewhat emphatic terms, but we are unfortunately limited to the rather narrow field covered by this tiny Bill. Also, I should be out of order if I embarked upon an explanation of my own views and the views of my hon. Friends in this matter.
What I do—we have done it before, and we think we should do it again—is to reassert and re-emphasise our fundamental objections to the Bill, which we thoroughly dislike; and we intend, by our vote this evening, to reassert our dislike of it.
As we have frequently said, the Bill leaves the hereditary character of the House of Lords unchanged. The Lord Privy Seal himself has said so. He said that so far as he could see the Bill would not affect it, but would leave it as it was. That is exactly what we dislike about it.
Secondly, we agree with the Lord Privy Seal that the Bill leaves the powers of the House of Lords intact. The House of Lords could obstruct, delay and frustrate to the same extent as it can at present the will of the elected representatives of the people sitting in the House of Commons. In saying that I am repeating what the Lord Privy Seal said a few minutes ago.
Our third objection is that the purpose of the Bill is, and is avowed to be, to create from a semi-torpid Chamber a lively and active opposition to the Labour Party in Parliament. We do not like that, and we cannot be expected to welcome it. The whole object is to galvanise the present House of Lords into an activity which at present it does not display, and to vest it for that purpose with a large Conservative majority, which, at the moment, is bad enough but the presence of which, when a Labour Government comes to office next year, would be well-nigh intolerable.
The fourth thing that we dislike about the Bill is the situation with regard to payment, about which, I gather, we shall be told more by the hon. Member for Horsham (Mr. Gough) if he succeeds in catching Mr. Speaker's eye. We shall all be very eager to hear what the hon. Member has to tell us about that. No doubt he is fully informed. If he will do something to remove the present confusion in the House he will do the House a great service.
For all those reasons my hon. Friends and I thoroughly and cordially dislike the Bill. When you finally put the Question. Mr. Speaker, we shall go to the Division Lobby to record our vote and show how thoroughly we dislike the Bill. We hope, however, that even now the Government may withdraw it.

4.32 p.m.

Viscountess Davidson: In view of last week's debate, I must say a few words about Clause 3. For years all the women's organisations in the country have been pressing and fighting for fair and equal treatment for women, and we women Members of Parliament have supported them on every possible occasion. Since women have been allowed to sit in the House of Commons pressure has been brought on all Governments to include in any reforms of the House of Lords the right for women also to be admitted into the House of Lords. In my opinion, it would be disastrous if an impression were now given that we women Members of Parliament are not in favour of this important and essential reform.
When many years ago my father introduced a Private Bill, one of the first Private Bills, to give votes to women, he was strongly opposed, and the Bill was strongly opposed, by the then Liberal Prime Minister, Mr. Asquith—the grandfather of our newest recruit to the House, the hon. Member for Torrington (Mr. Bonham-Carter)—and many of his colleagues also opposed the Bill. My father made himself extremely unpopular at that time because he was a great believer in women having equal chances with men.
I would remind the House that the first woman Member of Parliament was a Conservative. It was a Conservative Prime Minister who also gave what is known as the "flapper vote", allowing women to vote at the same age as men. Now a Conservative Government are taking the final step, the last milestone in the emancipation of women. The record of our party is one of which we can be proud, and I hope that women's organisations, particularly those organisations which have been fighting for equal rights for women, and women throughout the country, will not forget that a Conservative Government have taken this step.

4.35 p.m.

Mr. Leslie Hale: The hon. Lady the Member for Hemel Hempstead (Viscountess Davidson) has referred, with apparently more knowledge than has been given to the House, to the situation of women in the reformed House of Peers. We do not even know whether they will get equal pay for equal work.
I had a deputation on behalf of the firewomen of Oldham on Sunday. They


told me that they are being paid 80 per cent. of the male rate of pay. As their job is precisely what the life peeresses will be called upon to do, to rush into a perishing and derelict building and preserve it for the benefit of posterity, it seems that the hon. Lady may well be thinking that things are going to happen which are not going to happen.
The Home Secretary is always courteous and rather disarming, and when he makes a courteous but uninformative opening such as he has done today it is very difficult for us to offer criticism. He said that he now concedes that perhaps the Wensleydale decision was wrong. That is rather putting it in a slightly minor tone. I have no doubt that he has turned up the dictum of Professor Freeman at the time, and what he said was this:
The Lords, in defiance of law, in defiance of history, in defiance of the clear rights of the Crown and of the manifest expediency of the case, had the matchless impudence to refuse to Lord Wensleydale, a baron of the Realm as lawfully created as any of them, his lawful seat in the House… The body which thus disloyally, almost rebelliously flouted the Crown has no right to claim respect on any grounds of antiquity or traditional dignity when, in like spirit, they turn round and flout the people.
That dictum was almost universally accepted except in the comment of Professor Thorold Rogers:
Where, ladling butter from a large tureen, See blustering Freeman, buttering blundering Green.
I should have thought that we had reached the stage when both sides of the House might have said that the Wensleydale decision was wrong. I concede that after this long time, whether the Wensleydale decision was wrong or not, if it is to be put right or wrong it could obviously only be done now by legislation.
The right hon. Gentleman has in the course of a number of speeches made vague references to the sort of thing that he had in mind. My right hon. and learned Friend the Member for Newport (Sir F. Soskice) has pointed to our doubts in this matter. The Home Secretary said on one occasion, I think—it might have been his National Liberal colleague, the Secretary of State for Scotland, who has, I believe, a brother in another place and, therefore, has a considerable interest in these financial arrangements—that they

were going to consider the Free Church of Scotland—

Mr. Emrys Hughes: The Established Church of Scotland.

Mr. Hale: Yes, the Established Church of Scotland. There was the famous speech by Lord Brougham in which he pointed out that they had managed to get on excellently without bishops, let alone without peers. Maybe that proposal will not be welcomed.
The Home Secretary said that he would appoint men of all parties. I have been trying to find out who are people of all parties, and the only two I can think of are the right hon. Gentleman the Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster and the defeated Conservative candidate at Torrington. On the other hand, if the right hon. Gentleman meant men of each party, then of course, while I do not approve of the proposal, there are certain attractions about it. It might very well be a very wise and statesmanlike gesture to offer a life dukedom to Mr. Pollitt, as a preliminary to the Summit Conference.
There are implications in this, Mr. Deputy-Speaker, that I imagine the noble Lord the Member for Dorset, South (Viscount Hinchingbrooke) may deal with later, if he is fortunate enough to catch your eye. After all, it was the Duke of Rutland who, in his salad days, said:
Let Wealth and Commerce, Laws and Learning die,
But leave us still our old nobility.
I must admit that he rather apologised for that afterwards, as a youthful indiscretion.
There were a number of people, Mr. J. H. Round for one, who were not loath to point out that he was several hundred years out of date, and that the old nobility died with the Wars of the Roses, after which, it was said, a Norman baron was as rare in England as a wolf. There were 29 peers, according to one authority, 30 according to another, who sat in the Parliament of Henry VII, and Mr. G. W. E. Russell, with the help of Mr. Round, has given us some comments on the present old nobility.
In fact, if I may say so, the right hon. Gentleman was a little in error in one thing. There never was a hereditary


peerage. They were summoned to a Session. There never was a life peerage in the period of which I am now talking—the period prior to the Wars of the Roses. They were summoned for a Session, and in relation to the land they owned. At the next Session, because they still owned the same land, they were summoned again, and so they gradually established that the right belonged to their children.
So we got the fantastic series of cases, when peerage brokers in the nineteenth century were searching the rolls of heralds, and families were claiming peerages that had been dormant for 600 years by claiming that they had descended through the female side—people who had never had any connection with the land on which the title was based—a fantastic state of things.
It is a great pity that the Lords were not taken in hand a considerable time ago—but I do not want to go into that now. This old nobility is really a very untenable proposition. I was delighted to find that Mr. G.W. E. Russell, who himself, of course, comes from a political family of the greatest possible importance and reputability, uses a phrase which I will use myself. He said that the Dukedoms of Grafton, Richmond and Portsmouth were due to the levity of Charles II, and that the Dukedom of Buccleuch had the bar sinister twice from John of Gaunt—and so it goes on.
I can remember the famous saying attributed to Sydney Smith, but which should be attributed to Jeremiah Keller, who said:
It is a shocking thing that, against all Nature, Mayne should have risen by his gravity and I should have sunk by my levity.
It is rather an astonishing proposition that one can rise by the levity of one's illegitimate parents, but this is the levity to which, apparently, Mr. Russell refers. The Howards are descended from a swineherd—and no worse for that; the Duke of Bedford descended from a fishmonger at Poole, and the Duke of Devonshire from a body servant of Cardinal Wolsey—

Mr. Deputy-Speaker (Sir Charles Mac-Andrew): I am sure it is perfectly true, but it does not come under the Third Reading of this Bill, does it?

Mr. Hale: I am much obliged, Sir Charles. I will not address respectful submissions to you because I have passed that point, and know that it would be a waste of time to do so. However, it is, I think, material to say, in relation to the status of life peers and the sort of respect they are likely to have in the other place, that when the daughter of an English earl married into the illustrious family of Esterhazy in 1842 it is recorded that she found life intolerable in Vienna because she had only 15 quarterings out of 16 and, as her grandmother's father was a banker, she could not be accepted in society.
Of course, the status of bankers has gone up in the last weeks with Mr. Bulganin. It is, nevertheless, a matter about which we should exercise some concern. We do not want another place to become a warring battleground. Imagine someone going there from commerce as a life peer—how unhappy his life would have been with the sixth Duke of Somerset, who reproved his second wife for tapping his arm lightly with her fan. He said, "Madam, my first wife would never have presumed to commit such an act of familiarity, and she was a Percy." His second wife only came from the family of a marquis—and he a lawyer at that!
On the very relevant subject of who is to have the peerages, I think that it is right that we should have regard to the fourth estate of the realm in dealing with one of the other estates. The fourth estate has professed to have a great deal more information about the likely new appointments than the right hon. Gentleman has given to us. We are told there may be a new lady viscount. Apparently it is the Government's intention that both Houses should be a pageant of history—Magna Carta to Bonham-Carter, and from the stern age of the landlords to the salad days of the Tennants. I must say that I am inhibited by what I regard as the unexpected presence of the hon. Member for Torrington (Mr. Bonham-Carter) from pursuing the point.
The Daily Express said one thing about the new appointments, and I hope that the right hon. Gentleman, whatever the salary is to be, will have a conference with his right hon. Friend the Minister of Pensions and National Insurance to make sure that the lady peers do not


lose their retirement pensions by voting in the House of Lords. That, I think, would be a somewhat mean and unnecessary economy.
The question of the qualifications needed has, of course, been the subject of a great deal of controversy over the centuries, and it is really important that we should bear in mind what qualifications are needed. Here I must confess that I find myself on the side of the right hon. Gentleman. It really is not true that all that is needed, once Her Majesty has signalled her approbation of one's appointment as a life peer, is a couple of hours at Moss Bros. and sending the missus to a finishing school at Paris. There is much more to it than that.
The whole tenor of one's society changes. It may be that instead of having a "quick 'un" at the nineteenth hole, it becomes a question of lunching with Onassis or dining on the "Shemara". A man has to attune himself to his new responsibilities—which are not inconsiderable—and the right hon. Gentleman may find it difficult to find people who are capable of doing it. I do not wish to be indelicate, but Thomas Carlyle expressed some views about this. He himself attributed them to Professor Teufelsdrockh, but no one has ever been able to place that distinguished gentleman. Carlyle wrote:
Often in my atrabiliar moods, when I read of pompous ceremonials, Frankfort coronations, royal drawing-rooms, levees, couchees; and how the ushers and macers and pursuivants are all in waiting; how duke this is presented by archduke that and colonel A by general B, and innumerable bishops, admirals and miscellaneous functionaries, are advancing gallantly to the anointed presence; and I strive, in my remote privacy to form a clear picture of that solemnity—on a sudden, as by some enchanter's wand, the—shallI speak it?—the clothes fly-off the whole dramatic corps; and dukes, grandees, bishops, generals, anointed presence itself every mother's son of them stand straddling there, not a shirt on them; and I know not whether to laugh or weep. This physical or psychical infirmity, in which perhaps I am not singular, I have, after hesitation, thought right to publish, for the solace of those afflicted with the like.
Imagination boggles at what may happen when we have a mixed House of Peers. I suggest that the right hon. Gentleman should seriously consider the excision of that Clause which limits life peerages to persons of British birth, because it seems to me that if that sort of thing

were to happen in another place, it could be presented only under a London "A" certificate with M. Robert Dhéry as Lord Chamberlain. It is a point to be considered whether Miss Brigitte Bardot might not, on the whole, be a more suitable nominee in the circumstances. At any rate, I am quite sure that she would be able to bring in the backwoodsmen.
We have very little information about what is to happen. We do not know what the payment is to be. This is a serious matter. Obviously, if we are to have representative people brought in to make the House representative, this can be done only on the basis of some payment. Otherwise, one would have to leave out many men of distinction and ability who are not able to face the burden. We ought to have been informed about that. The information which has been given to us is wholly inadequate to enable anyone to vote unhesitatingly for the Bill. So far as I am concerned, I sincerely hope that my right hon. Friend will say that he intends to vote against it. Perhaps not enough justice has been done to the peers, for it is true to say that, in the past, the wives of the eldest sons of peers were our principal dollar import, and they did a very great deal in that way to close the dollar gap. It was, in fact, only when it was said that one duke had four duchesses concurrently receiving alimony, all living outside the sterling area, that the financial situation took a turn for the worse.
I have tried to make a few gentle points against the Bill, without being too desperately critical. We shall regard the future with considerable concern. We can say only that we shall watch the progress of another place, if this Bill passes, with considerable, but a little worried, interest.

4.53 p.m.

Mr. Nigel Fisher: Obviously, it is extremely difficult to follow the hon. Gentleman the Member for Oldham, West (Mr. Hale) in his very wide-ranging and amusing speech, which had very little to do with the Third Reading of the Bill. It is the more difficult because I regret to say that I wish to make a shorter but, nevertheless, a fairly serious contribution to the discussion. I hope the hon. Gentleman will forgive me, therefore, if I do not follow his speech, which as always


we all enjoyed very much. Most of us—though not the hon. Member for Oldham, West—who are interested in this subject have already said most of what we had to say on Second Reading, and I shall not detain the House for long.
With one reservation I think that this is an extremely useful and quite an important Bill. I believe that it will improve the composition of another place and that it will assist in its efficient working as a second Chamber. I think that is why so many hon. Members opposite dislike it. Those who wish to abolish the House of Peers altogether, as do some hon. Members opposite, naturally dislike seeing it improved; they fear that the better it functions the more difficult it will be to justify its abolition. That is an attitude which I can well understand but which, if I may say so, I find it less easy to respect.
Certain hon. Members opposite, notably the hon. Member for Nuneaton (Mr. Bowles) and the hon. Lady the Member for Cannock (Miss Lee), see no value in a second Chamber at all; but that is not the view of the majority of their colleagues. Those who take that view, naturally, must oppose the Bill. To them I would merely say that we are already very near to one-Chamber Government as things are today—rather too near for my liking. It is my view, a view which it may be rather unpopular to express, that electoral majorities are not necessarily or inevitably always right or always infallible in their judgments. I think they are broadly right on most occasions, but that is rather different. It does not follow that, in every case, they are right or even that they are adequately informed or consulted about particular measures which may or may not have formed part of election manifestoes at the time when the parties last went to the polls.
I fully understand the sense of frustration and unfairness which hon. Members opposite may feel when they see a permanent Conservative majority in another place which can, though it very seldom does, send back some of their legislation, but which is much less likely, on the face of it, to send back any of ours. I understand that attitude, but surely the same thing is likely to happen in any second Chamber because, by its very nature, a second Chamber must

be, inherently, a brake to check a perhaps over-hasty passion for so-called progress; and to give this House and possibly even the electorate as a whole, an opportunity to think again.
When, as in our case, there is no written constitution, that is exactly what a second Chamber is for. As things are at present, it is a very small brake and the delaying power is very slight. The powers of the House of Lords must, I should think, be smaller than those of any other second Chamber in any democratic country in the world. They are, I think, as small as one could possibly devise, if there is to be any lingering power at all. Those powers are not being altered under the Bill. The composition of the other place, which is being altered under the Bill, is being altered. I should think, in a way which will make it less abhorrent to hon. and right hon. Gentlemen opposite than it is today.

Mr. Bowles: Unlike a large number of hon. Members, I was returned in 1942 under the electoral truce, which was no election at all. Then, in 1945, I was elected by the people of my constituency. Can the hon. Gentleman possibly understand the difference in my own feeling of authority to speak, to oppose or to support legislation when, on the one hand, I felt I had derived my power from the people, and, on the other hand, I previously had not? How on earth can any person in another place, whether nominated by the Prime Minister or by the Leader of the Opposition, feel in his heart of hearts that he has any right whatever to interfere with what is done by elected representatives?

Mr. Fisher: I quite appreciate the feeling the hon. Gentleman had in 1945 as opposed to what he felt in 1942. I respect that, and I think that one does feel a certain reinforcement of one's own authority if one has been elected by the votes of the people. But, if I may say so, the point to which he went from that argument is not particularly relevant, in that I understand that the majority of his party favour a second Chamber, and, presumably, a nominated second Chamber, to which the same objection as he makes now would, in principle, obviously apply.

Mr. Bowles: No. I am quite sure that the hon. Gentleman knows less about my party than I do. I am perfectly certain


that not a single person in the constituencies in the Labour Party has a moment's time for another place.

Mr. Fisher: I believe that to be true. The Labour Party has no time for another place as it is at present constituted, but I understood from speeches made on Second Reading by hon. Members opposite that the majority of the hon. Gentleman's colleagues favour a second Chamber of some sort. I know that the hon. Gentleman and the hon. Lady the Member for Cannock do not favour it, but I believe that the majority favour some form of second Chamber, to which the objections that the hon. Gentleman makes would apply as much as to the second Chamber that we are now discussing.
The composition of another place as a result of this Bill should be less distasteful to hon. Members opposite than hitherto. The self-denying ordinance proposed by the Swinton Committee will decrease the number of Conservative peers, and this Bill should increase the number of Socialist peers. Over a period of time the Bill may increase the Labour Party's representation in another place very considerably.
I think that this is an important constitutional Bill because it gives to a future Labour Prime Minister a political weapon of great power and significance if he cares to make use of it. I fully realise that, and I think that that was the point made by the hon. Member for Bristol, South-East (Mr. Benn) on Second Reading. Nevertheless, I support the Bill, because if another place is to work efficiently and without intolerable strain upon a very few Labour peers, as at present, their numbers must be reinforced; and the main purpose of the Bill, I think, is to facilitate that necessary reinforcement so far as the Opposition is concerned. It is a purpose that I support because no democratic assembly in the world can work effectively without a proper Opposition.
To those hon. Members opposite—I think the majority—who think that there is value in some form of second Chamber but who would like a different sort of second Chamber, I would say this: here is a ready-made second Chamber which works and which I hope will work even more efficiently after the passage of the Bill. It may be difficult for us here

to agree about its exact composition, but surely it would be infinitely more difficult for us to reach agreement about the composition of an entirely different type of second Chamber which does not exist at the moment. Let us try to improve what we have instead of starting de novo on something different which might turn out in the end to work less well than the present second Chamber. There is no virtue in change unless it is also improvement.
I have one practical reservation about the Bill. I do not see how it can achieve its purpose unless the peers are paid. I ventured to make that criticism on Second Reading, and so did most other hon. Members. I am disappointed that the Government have taken no notice of the criticism that we then made. I must not elaborate upon that now, because it would be out of order to do so on Third Reading. I shall content myself, therefore, with saying that I hope the Government have not thought their last thought or said their last word on this question. I say that only because I want the Bill to work effectively and I want the House of Lords to work effectively. If another place is to get the recruits that it needs and hopes for under this Bill, I am sure that the question of remuneration will have to be faced and dealt with sooner or later, and it is in that hopeful expectation that I support the Bill and wish it well.

Mr. E. Fletcher: So that I can understand the hon. Gentleman, will he say whether he is recommending payment for life in the case of life peers, irrespective of how long they live?

Mr. Fisher: If there is to be payment of life peers, it must be for life. I do not understand the point of the hon. Member's question.

5.4 p.m.

Miss Jennie Lee: I think that I have listened to almost all of the speeches that have been made on the Bill. At the end of the Third Reading I shall vote against it, and I shall vote in the company of every hon. Member of Her Majesty's Opposition. We are, without any reservations at all, opposed to the Bill. It fills me with sadness that the United Kingdom House of Commons should be asked to pass a Measure of this kind in the year 1958.
My objection is fundamentally based on my deep respect for this Chamber to which we have the honour to belong. I have found it a privilege to explain, in many parts of the world, how we do our job in this Chamber, particularly how the Prime Minister and leading Ministers of the day answer Questions put to them, sometimes on matters of the gravest international importance and sometimes on matters that seem very small and humble, but which matter to subjects of Her Majesty.
There is not a Chamber in the world like our own and we have in our own House something on which to build. I want to see the House of Commons grow in status and dignity. I believe that at present some of our hon. Members are not used enough. Some are overworked, but some are underworked. I should like to see an expansion of our powers. I should like to see the whole physical setup of the Palace of Westminster reorganised and, along with this reorganisation, I should like us to adjust ourselves to some of our contemporary needs.
It is difficult to boast of an institution to which one belongs without seeming to be conceited. With the utmost personal humility, and conscious of our individual shortcomings, we can all acknowledge that this House was here before we were and will be here after us. One thing that has contributed to the best features of British history is that we have been able to argue differences of philosophy and economics, sometimes lightly and sometimes very deeply indeed, within this Chamber.
Again and again we are refreshed by rebel elements. which is important. What I fear so much about the other place is that nobody gets there until he is on his way down, not on his way up. The rebels are never appointed. I am certain that when we come to the appointment of life peers, if that should ever take place—and I hope that our hon. Members on this side will not lend themselves to it—neither the leading members of the Government nor of the Opposition will advise Her Majesty to honour somebody who has not yet "arrived".

Captain Richard Pilkington: Is not that an argument for the hereditary principle?

Miss Lee: If I have to choose between life peers and hereditary peers, I prefer the hereditary principle. But I think that the whole hereditary principle is out of date. When we elect on the hereditary principle, we elect someone for services rendered. We are, presumably, honouring them for what they have done, although I would like to hear my hon. Friend the Member for Oldham, West (Mr. Hale) enlarge on that topic, especially as, once upon a time, he was a member of the Liberal Party and has a bit of inside information about certain services.
In the main, people are honoured for services rendered. We do not think that they should be elevated to another place and made hereditary peers to do certain hours of work per day for certain jobs. The principle that is now being introduced is that we shall continue to have peers, honoured as hereditary peers for services rendered, who may or may not take an active part in the work of the other place. But we are told that we shall nominate life peers and peeresses specifically to do a job in the other place. But before we even nominate them they must belong to the establishment. They may call themselves Conservatives, Socialists, non-party—and we all know what non-party animals are. Anyone who has gone canvassing knows precisely what is meant by "non-party".
The refreshment of our history has been the possibility of new, fresh iconoclastic elements. A rebel could be elected by the people of the country, but a rebel would never be nominated by the leaders of any political party, because once people are elected in that form they are no longer rebels.
We are asked to accept a Bill which says that certain men and women will be selected and honoured
for better for worse … in sickness and in health…till death"—
do them part from the House of Lords. Most of them will not be young when they start. Are they to remain life peers irrespective of whether they are sick or well? They can change their politics, party or religion. In these modern days, some of them even change their sex.
Therefore, I simply cannot follow the argument from the Government Front Bench that the whole purpose of the Bill is to strengthen the Opposition in the


House of Lords. It seems perfectly obvious that the majority will be Conservative, in spirit if not in label. I do not say that disparagingly. It is part of the very nature of things.
Anybody who has ever known a Minister try to find people to occupy positions of authority and privilege knows that there is a narrow circle in which he goes round and round. The great majority of people outside come in through very different ways. The distinction of our Chamber is that now and then it allows people to come through who would never be nominated by the head of any party, and so we get the refreshment.
The Home Secretary said that we could not do without a second Chamber. I beg to differ. When the right hon. Gentleman states that proposition, he should say that he cannot do without a second Chamber. I can do without it. I do not want to sound offensive, but I consider that the whole publicity in the Press, in reporting and broadcasting, and the whole assumptions from the debates, have been extremely one-sided. On that basis, we can go on arguing as if a premise was agreed to before we began the argument, whereas the point of view of many of us on this side has been simply ignored.
The Home Secretary did not have much to say today, so I do not grudge him making a little fun about my attitude towards life peeresses. The women's organisations of our Labour and trade union movement do not matter to hon. Members opposite. When they are talking of women's organisations, it is astonishing how often they think only of professional women's organisations. The fact that there is a Women's Co-operative Guild and that women's sections of the Labour Party are attached to many of our trade unions, representing many millions of women, does not even concern hon. Members opposite.
One of the things I was asked when I first came to London as a Member of Parliament was to support a proposition that women should be allowed to do anything that men could do in industry, including working underground in the coal mines. I think that the people in question called themselves the Seven Point organisation. I considered that to be nonsense. I am not particularly anxious to have as many murderesses among women as there

are murderers among men. If I consider an institution objectionable in itself, I cannot understand the cock-eyed logic which asks me, even though I object to it and regard it as utterly obsolete and feel that the country would be better without it, to be a member of it. That is an entirely illogical situation.
I have made my position quite clear in saying that I am opposed to both men and women being members of a second Chamber. I think that if we have to choose between life peerages and hereditary peerages, it is much better to have the hereditary peerages and, for a certain number of them, to make it their public responsibility to carry on the work of a second Chamber.
When the hon. Member for Hitchin (Mr. Fisher) argues that we cannot have a one-Chamber Government, he sees the issue differently from myself. When we have Tories forming the Government, we have one-Chamber government on all the great political issues of the day. It is the height of absurdity that in the year 1958, instead of trying to adjust our institutions to the needs and spirit of the times, we should be engaged in discussing such a foolish, retrograde and completely unworkable Measure.

5.15 p.m.

Mrs. Evelyn Emmet: I will not follow the hon. Lady the Member for Cannock (Miss Lee) in her arguments, because we differ so completely in our conclusions that it would be a waste of the time of the House. Obviously, if the hon. Lady had the choosing of peers, either hereditary or life, the other place would be an extremely amusing set-up, probably full of rebels, and a great deal more troublesome than the present second Chamber.
I wish to raise one point which has not been mentioned but which today is of particular interest. Some of us have just come from a lunch given to the Secretary-General of the United Nations, and others have been listening to him upstairs. It is interesting that the Third Reading of the Bill should be taking place just when the Secretary-General is with us, because until the Bill goes through and it is possible for women to sit in the other place, it is impossible for us to sign the Convention on the Political Rights of Women passed by the Assembly of the United Nations in 1953.


When the Bill is through, we shall be in a position to ratify that Convention. I therefore welcome the Bill from that point of view.
I welcome the Bill also because, after thirty years in politics and having gradually seen all the disabilities attaching to women in political life fall away, it is interesting to me to see this last disability finally come to a happy conclusion today so that men and women can walk side by side as companions instead of woman following humbly after her lord and master, which used to be the old idea.

Miss Lee: Where does the hon. Lady's logic take us with hereditary peeresses? Have they still to walk behind?

Mrs. Emmet: It occurs to me—I do not know whether it has occurred to my right hon. Friend the Home Secretary—that there is a way out of that. The sensible line would be to admit them at a later stage. Indeed, to leave out the six peeresses is a delightful example of how illogical, not women, but men can be in certain matters. One possible solution, which may already have occurred to my right hon. Friend the Home Secretary, is that the six hereditary peeresses might be immediately made life peeresses also. They could then sit in the other House.
I thank the Government for introducing the Bill, and I very much look forward to seeing women sitting in another place and thereby having complete political equality with men.

5.18 p.m.

Mr. Wedgwood Benn: I congratulate the hon. Lady the Member for East Grinstead (Mrs. Emmet) on introducing into the controversy over the House of Lords the first new point for forty years. The hon. Lady tells us that the reason for the Bill, after all the trouble we have had, is that it is in response to the United Nations Convention on the rights of women. In that case, I refer the hon. Lady to Article 25 of the Declaration of Human Rights, which, like most hon. Members, I carry with me and to which, naturally, I referred when I heard the hon. Lady speak. I see that the hon. Lady carries it with her also.
If the hon. Lady refers to Article 25, she will see that all children, whether born in or out of wedlock, shall enjoy the same social protection. In this society, those

born in wedlock suffer from the disability which the hon. Lady knows very well and which, I hope, the Government will soon amend by allowing people to apply to the county courts under the new Landlord and Tenant Act for a special certificate of bastardy. I shall certainly go there myself to see whether I cannot get my position put right.

Mrs. Emmet: We have taken one step forward. There is no reason why we should not take another step forward in the Charter at another time.

Mr. Benn: If the hon. Lady wishes to join me in my quest for illegitimacy, perhaps we can have a talk behind Mr. Speaker's Chair afterwards.
We have now entered the final stage in the controvery concerning life peers. I shall not add to anything that my right hon. and learned Friend the Member for Newport (Sir F. Soskice) said in opening the debate from this side of the House. It is quite clear that the view of my hon. Friends and myself is that we cannot improve a Chamber which consists, and will continue to consist, primarily of hereditary peers, and which has, and will continue to have, powers that can be used against the elected Chamber. We cannot improve it by putting in a number of life peers.
At the same time, we must recognise that with this Bill we come to the end of a long period of controversy which began in 1908 or 1909 and has continued almost uninterrupted ever since. It is the controversy which has gone on between what one might in general call the Radicals and the Tories on the subject of the second Chamber.
The attitude of the Radicals has been that we are against the House of Lords, but that we will not do anything about it at the moment. I have read many articles written by my hon. Friend saying that it should be left alone. I am reminded of the tactics used by Joshua when he launched his attack on Jericho. He took his army, with the priests and their trumpets, and marched round the place seven times for seven days. They blasted their trumpets in a way which my hon. Friend the Member for Cannock (Miss Lee) has done often, and then the walls fell.
The difference in the case of the Radicals is that this blasting of trumpets


has been going on for forty or fifty years. If I interviewed my hon. Friend, who is the Joshua in this case, and asked her what she was doing, I think the only justification she could bring forward would be to say that she was helping to make the place look ridiculous. If Joshua had had to satisfy his army after a long period of trumpeting, it is unlikely that he would have carried his own people with him.
On the other hand, the Government's behaviour on this matter reminds me of another famous story from the Bible, what happened at Sodom and Gomorrah, where there were certain unhappy practices which, for the purpose of this analogy, we can call hereditary practices, and which disturbed the Lord. Abraham went to the Lord and asked, if he could find 50 good men in the cities, would the Lord spare them? The Lord was generous. In parentheses, may I say that this is Lord Salisbury's reform of the composition of Sodom and Gomorrah. Abraham had to go back to the Lord and ask if the cities could be saved if there were only 30 good men. The Lord agreed, but Abraham had to ask if he would be content with 20. In the end, he could find no one willing to give up his hereditary practices. So now we have a proposal under this Bill that ten good men should be found in the hope that this will spare Sodom and Gomorrah from the results of their folly.
This Bill has altered the character of the House of Lords and, when it is enacted, we shall be confronted as a community with a new House and a new problem. The reason is because, besides the Life Peerages Bill, there are two other important changes. There are the life peers who will be going to the House of Lords, attending the House one presumes, and taking part in the debates. As my hon. Friend suspects, if interesting men and women are appointed, the House of Lords will be more interesting. That is the intention of the Bill. As a result, their debates will receive close attention.
Secondly, these life peers, like hereditary peers, will be paid. There is nothing better for attracting members of the House of Lords to attend to their business than the present £3 a day payment which, we gather from the Leader of the House, will be increased probably to a figure nearer

£1,000 a year. And, of course, we are being asked to make more people available to do the work and to receive the payment.
The third great change we must take into consideration, because the Leader of the House himself mentioned it, is the fact that under the Swinton proposals it is intended to keep away some of the backwoodsmen who hardly ever attend. Figures on this are not easy to find, but certainly up to November, 1956—that was only 18 months after the last General Election—267 peers had not even bothered to take the oath and 280 of them had turned up less than ten times. So about 550 of what might be called the backwoodsmen—who cannot be kept away because that can only be done by legislation—are to be frightened away or are to be given a cool reception if they turn up.
So the life peers will go into a second Chamber which will have altered its character considerably and will be a new, and, in my view, much more formidable one. Therefore, one change has come about which my colleagues in the Labour Party must take into consideration: it is that by no stretch of the imagination can the new House of Lords to which we shall be sending these life peers be presented as an absurdity. For that reason my hon. Friend objects to it, and for that reason we on this side of the House cannot accept it. The point is that if the new House of Lords to which we shall be sending the life peers is not absurd, we shall lose the great protection we have relied on in the past; that is to say, in the event of a conflict we should be sure to win. That protection passes from us, and we shall be faced with a House which has enough powers to do a lot of damage and will not be afraid of using them. That is what faces us in this Third Reading debate.
I can only anticipate the tactics which will be pursued by the Conservative leaders in the new House of Lords, but I would think that the danger of that new House with its life peers will be that the leaders of the Conservative Opposition after the next Election will wait until they can pick, and are able to choose, an occasion when they think the country is with them on a certain issue. Then they will challenge a Labour Government.
It is curious that the hon. Gentleman the Member for Surbiton (Mr. Fisher) said he did not think a Government should go beyond the point where people were carried with them; that is to say, if the Government proposed a Measure which was unpopular, he thought it right that the Lords should stop it. That is absolutely contrary to the doctrine advanced recently by the Prime Minister, who said publicly that in his view a by-election which showed a vote of no confidence did not constitute a reason for the Government abandoning their policy.
Although I thoroughly detest the policy of the present Government, I think the Prime Minister is constitutionally right. When we elect a Government in this country we ought to allow it to stay its course, do what it thinks right and pick its own moment for going to the country. But what the Prime Minister denies to the by-election victors—the right to warn him to stop—the hon. Gentleman would give to another place. He would allow that second Chamber, which is by no means democratic, the right to stop an elected Labour Government. This second Chamber could, of course, pick an issue where possibly it had the support of the people against a progressive Government. It could do that, and thereby obscure its own right to delay by cashing in on popular discontent.
My own view about the second Chamber is that, by the very nature of its present constitution, it is incapable of being representative and, secondly, that even if it were representative, government by Gallup poll is not our way. We do not believe that the people should have a right to express their view on every single item every single day of every single year of every single Parliament.

Mr. Fisher: If I may interrupt the hon. Gentleman, may I say that the power of very slight delay is by no means the power to force a General Election, and no one would suggest that the House of Lords should have that power.

Mr. Benn: I am glad the hon. Gentleman has brought up this point. because it encourages me to develop it. If the present House of Lords were a Socialist House of Lords—that is to say, were anti-this Government—it would have thrown out the Rent Bill, and given in

justification of Lord Salisbury's grounds that the Rent Bill had never been presented to the electorate, had never been put before the people at the last Election, and that therefore there was no mandate for it. The Government would, therefore, have been compelled to introduce the Rent Bill twice and pass it twice through all its stages in the House of Commons. Six months' delay said like that does not really indicate the measure of the damage that a second Chamber can do to the House of Commons. It is the fact that any Minister who is determined to pursue his own policy—which he is entitled to do because he has the people behind him from the last Election—any Minister who does that has to measure how likely he is to get his Bill through, not once, but twice.
When the Leader of a Labour House of Commons is considering how to work out the timetable for the Session, he will discourage Labour Ministers from introducing Bills which may be thown out by another place and then have to be reintroduced. That was brought out brilliantly by my right hon. Friend the Member for Ebbw Vale (Mr. Bevan), when he described how, in the later stages of the last Labour Government, he was discouraged from certain provisions so that Bills might not lead to conflict with the House of Lords and thus make the timetable of the Commons more difficult.
The one great change which the Bill introduces is that it is no longer possible for the Labour Party to say, "We can leave the House of Lords to stew in its own juice and leave it to its own patent absurdity." It is now to be a formidable body, limited, but formidable, and capable of inflicting very great damage upon an elected House of Commons. Therefore, the presentation of this Bill is bound to reopen the question: What are we to do about it?
I am an abolitionist, but not a unicameralist, but I think that the unicameralists should now present their view not as an ideal, but as a practical way forward. I do not agree with them, but I believe that if one feels that there is a value in the second Chamber it is incumbent upon one to show what sort of second Chamber it should be.
My view is that we get very muddled and hot about the second Chamber. The


simple problem of the second Chamber is not the problem of composition. It is the problem of power, and if there is a second Chamber with no power it does not matter who sits in it. I think that the party opposite make a great mistake, if they want a constitutional development to go forward smoothly, to concentrate on the composition. A recent book has been published on this subject by Dr. Bromhead, and he analyses in detail the work of the House of Lords and says in his introduction—and I am sure that he is right—that to say, even from an academic point of view, that the present value of the second Chamber is in fruitless conflict and delay, is to distort it, because the value of the second Chamber, even for hon. Members opposite, is not in the few occasions when it can do damage to a Labour majority in the House of Commons, but in its debate and influence and the rest of it.
I suggest to my right hon. and hon. Friends that the Bill now compels us to look again at the problem of the second Chamber, and to decide, before we deal with the problem of composition—whether nominated or hereditary—whether it should have the right to frustrate the House of Commons. I say that it definitely should not have that right.
I should not undertake a reform by taking away power from the House of Lords. I would leave the House of Lords exactly as it is, but I would give the House of Commons the right to override the House of Lords. If the House of Commons were given power by resolution to override the House of Lords, the problem would be solved and there could be a discussion about how it should be composed.
There are many ways in which a second Chamber could be composed, and life peers is the proposition of this Bill. I am against life peers, because there is no justification in history for creating a new sort of nobility to fulfil very limited purposes. We are seeking not peers and noblemen for the House of Lords, but councillors whose voice we want raised in debate. That is the Government's intention. They are not seeking votes for the House of Lords. If they were, it would be even more absurd. What they are seeking is voices.
Our most ancient and distinguished voices in the country are those of the Privy Council. It would not be in order to say it now, but I have said in the past and still believe that if we want to add people for life to another place, we should add Privy Councillors who are the most distinguished representatives of those who give advice to the Crown. Then, of course, we want not only to send new people to the other place, but to shut out some of those who are already there.
I would shut out the hereditary peers, not on the ground that they are Conservative, although many of them are—many of them do not bother to indicate in Vacher's what their political affiliations are. I would shut them out on the ground that if the second Chamber is to be a good council chamber, it had better have its members picked for their goodness and ability, and not on the haphazard basis of the hereditary system.
It comes out in the book which I have quoted, although I have long suspected it, that the modern House of Lords is in practical terms a party chamber. There are about 60 people who attend regularly, of whom 40 are Conservative and 20 Labour. An analysis of attendance and an analysis of voting show that there are no non-party peers who take any active part at all. The idea that by means of a lot of intelligent generals like Field Marshal Montgomery and so on one can bring a fresh look and a fresh eye and a clear independent mind to the proceedings of another place is incorrect.
In so far as the House of Lords has a value at all, its value is that it is a working party assembly where, curiously enough—and I wish that the Liberals would realise this—cross-voting is as rare as in this House. Most peers vote according to their party line, without Whips to frighten them. They naturally vote along those party lines.
If I were free to decide how the reform of the House of Lords should be undertaken, I should have a nominated second Chamber with no power at all. Out of it we would get everything we need from a second Chamber, advice, counsel, influence, with no power whatsoever to frustrate the will of the House of Commons.
In a way, I am glad this Bill is going forward, because we are at the end of a


period of forty years of fruitless controversy in which on the one side there has been a proposal to reform, which has never been acceptable to the backwoodsmen, and on the other side there has been abolition, which has never been the policy of the party as a whole, because a second Chamber has some value.
If we could agree that the House of Lords should lose its power, all the special problems would be solved and it would be possible almost immediately for all three parties to agree on a sensible composition for an influential, but fundamentally powerless, second House.
I warn my right hon. and hon. Friends against believing that they can continue in the future as they have in the past, because this new Chamber will be a real menace to a Labour majority in the House of Commons. We have an opportunity now to put in our election manifesto the simple proposal, which I strongly recommend to be included, that a Labour Government would immediately take steps to prevent the second Chamber from frustrating the will of the Parliament to be elected at this election. I believe that such a simple proposal would in one miraculous way wind up this hideous and boring controversy and, in doing so, would carry the support of the majority of the people.

5.38 p.m.

Mr. Montgomery Hyde: The hon. Member for Bristol, South-East (Mr. Benn) will forgive me if I do not traverse his arguments in detail. I have some sympathy with him, because what he calls the haphazard hereditary system of another place may one day result in his being removed from this House; and I certainly sympathise with him and the House in such a terrible prospect.
The hon. Member apparently objects to what he calls the creation of a new class of nobility in the form of life peers. I would remind him that this is no creation of a new class of nobility, because life peers have been created at various times throughout history. Reference has been made to the Wensleydale case. That simply made it clear that life peers which the Sovereign was entitled to create could not sit and vote in another place.
Unlike the hon. Member, I do not regard the Bill, taken in conjunction with

the Swinton proposals, as making the House of Lords a formidable body. I think that the Bill will make it a more efficient, working body. Why I particularly welcome the Bill is because it affects a certain class of peer which has not been mentioned so far in our discussions; that is, the Irish peers, or the peers of Ireland. The Bill goes some way, but not the whole way, towards correcting what is an anomaly in our constitution. By Irish peers, of course, I mean those Irish peers who are not entitled at present to sit in the House of Lords. There are some Irish peers, about 50, who are also peers of the United Kingdom and who sit in the other House by virtue of their United Kingdom peerages. I am not concerned with them.
I am concerned with the 66 Irish peers who are not also United Kingdom peers or representative peers, and who, but for an omission in the Government of Ireland Act, 1920, would still be able to elect a proportion of their number to sit for life in the House of Lords. They are peers whose patents of creation date from before 1801 in Ireland, and under the present Bill they will be eligible for life peerages. Some of the Irish peers have come down a little bit in the world, but they are, by and large, a respectable, if occasionally overlooked, section of the community.
Perhaps I should say a word about how this anomaly came into existence. Before 1801, when there was a separate Parliament in Ireland which sat in Dublin, there was an Irish House of Lords. It is the descendants of those Irish peers whom I have particularly in mind. In the Act of Union which united the two Kingdoms of Great Britain and Ireland and the two Parliaments, in 1801, it was provided that there should be 28 so-called Irish representative peers who were to be chosen by their fellows to sit for life in the House of Lords of the United Kingdom Parliament here. Other Irish peers may be elected to the House of Commons, but only—and I have never been able to understand the reason—for constituencies in Great Britain.
After 1920, the machinery for the Irish peers to elect their representative peers became obsolete. There was no provision in the Government of Ireland Act, 1920, for continuing the election of Irish peers, and the 28 peers whom the Act of


Union provided should sit in the House of Lords for life have gradually dwindled, so that at present the number is reduced to two, the Lord Kilmorey and Lord de Vesci.
During the debate on the Parliament Bill, 1949, attention was drawn to this anomalous situation by Sir Hugh O'Neill, now Lord Rathcavan, who was then the hon. Member for Antrim. He said:
What I feel is that, so long as Irish representative Peers, or Irish Peers, exist, the only part of Ireland which now remains within the Commonwealth, namely, Northern Ireland, should have the right to its own quota of Irish representative Peers. That is a constitutional anomaly which at the moment is completely in the air, and I should have thought that this was the time to settle it."—[OFFICIAL REPORT, 11th May, 1949; Vol. 464, c. 1877.]
It was not settled then, and it is not completely settled now, though, in so far as the present Bill makes Irish peers eligible for life peerages, it is a step in the right direction.
Of the 66 existing Irish peers, about a dozen have a special connection with Northern Ireland through residence or other interests, and I hope that their claims will be remembered when the new life peers are being created. On these grounds particularly, I welcome the Bill, and I am sure that it will also be welcomed by that section of the community which has tended to be somewhat overlooked in our constitutional development, namely, the peers of Ireland.

5.44 p.m.

Mr. Emrys Hughes: I am glad to know that the Secretary of State for Scotland is to reply to the debate. This is some compensation to him, because the task of speaking for Scotland today about changes in the Rent Act was left to the Minister of Housing and Local Government.

Mr. Maclay: The hon. Member is wrong. I think that he was present at the time. A question was addressed to me on a Scottish point, and I dealt with it.

Mr. Hughes: There was a question, and the answer was drawn out of the Secretary of State after interrogation by my hon. Friend the Member for Hamilton (Mr. T. Fraser).

Mr. Maclay: It was not drawn out. I was sitting here, ready and eager to answer.

Mr. Deputy-Speaker: That has nothing to do with this Bill.

Mr. Hughes: I quite agree, Mr. Deputy-Speaker.
There is one point about Scotland that I should like to have elucidated. It has been stated in the Scottish Press that one of the Scottish peeresses is to be the defeated candidate for Kelvingrove. I should like to know whether that is so, because if the first life peeress is to be Mrs. Walter Elliot there will certainly be great objection, because it will mean the complete flouting of democracy. Although this lady did represent the policy of the Government in the by-election, that is no justification at all for her being sent to the House of Lords, and1 hope that we will have some denial of the rumour which has been very current in the Scottish Press.
I should like to know, too, what will be the feelings of the Earl of Glasgow when this Bill goes on to the Statute Book. The Earl of Glasgow and I have been closely associated in public life, and I have understood, though I do not agree with him, some of his criticisms of this Bill. When the Bill is passed the Earl of Glasgow will have to contemplate ladies sitting in the Tea Room and in the Library, and at that prospect the Earl of Glasgow is, very naturally, indignant.

Sir Arthur Vere Harvey: The hon. Gentleman has referred to rumours. Does he know that rumour has it that his right hon. Friend the Member for Warrington (Dr. Summerskill) may go to another place? Does he think that the Earl of Glasgow will enjoy that situation?

Mr. Hughes: There have been many rumours that could be denied. Indeed, I have been the victim of one of them, which hinted that I am to go there. I hasten to dispose of that by saying that I will not go to the Upper House except as a bishop.
I want to return to the sad case of the Earl of Glasgow, with whom I have been associated for many years in public life in the county which I represent. This will be a sad day for the Earl of Glasgow. When ladies appear in the House of


Lords, what will the Earl of Glasgow do? Will he stop going there? Is the Earl of Glasgow going on strike? There is an even worse prospect than that. There was a time when the Earl of Glasgow was chairman of the Ayr County Council, and the prospect may now be that the Earl of Glasgow, disgusted at the prospect of having to see peeresses in the House of Lords, will return to the county council, which would be a very great calamity indeed for Ayrshire.
Unfortunately, it does not end there, because if the Earl of Glasgow decides not to go to the House of Lords because ladies are there, he will have to go to the county council, where he will also find ladies. The dilemma of the Earl of Glasgow is a very real one and as an old friend of his, and speaking to some extent on his behalf, I say that this is a sad day for him.
Then there is the case of the Minister himself going to the other place. This possibility was hinted at in the speech of my hon. Friend the Member for Oldham, West (Mr. Hale). I understand that after his announcement today there is a possibility that the Minister of Housing and Local Government will go to another place. If he does we shall demand similar rights for Scotland. We shall all be sorry to see the Secretary of State for Scotland leave us, but we think he ought to go. But if he does go to another place under the provisions of the Bill he will find his brother there, which would be not only setting class against class, but brother against brother.
During the debate the possibility has been mentioned of introducing a system of increasing payment for peers. I am quite sure that no self-respecting Scottish peer will serve in the House of Lords for less than £5,000 a year and a promise of £50,000 compensation if the House of Lords is abolished by a Labour Government. It is possible that we shall have two classes of peers in the same family—one a hereditary peer, such as the right hon. Member's brother, and a life peer, the right hon. Gentleman himself.

Mr. John Mackie: If my right hon. Friend the Secretary of State went to the House of Lords he would have to go as a viscount. As the hon. Member will be aware, life peers—or "lifers", as they are sometimes

irreverently called—are limited to the lowest order of the peerage, that is to say, the barons.

Mr. Hughes: The hon. Member has given us another example of injustice to Scotland. I can assure him that his chances of getting to the House of Lords, even as a bishop, are much more slender than mine.

Mr. Mackie: I do not want to go.

Mr. Hughes: The hon. Member says that he does not want to go. Neither do I. That is the first point upon which I have agreed with him for many a long year.
The case of Mr. Bulganin has been mentioned. He has been made Chairman of the National Bank of the Soviet Union. I am afraid that the Scots will not have the Secretary of State as Chairman of the National Bank of Scotland—not after his explanation of Government finance, in Committee. The unfortunate Secretary of State will place the Government in a very great dilemma, however they dispose of him—and we shall have the greatest regrets when he goes, because he is personally very acceptable, although he is a political disaster for Scotland.
There has been a suggestion that the name of the second Chamber should be changed. I would not dream of going so far as my hon. Friend the Member for Bristol, South-East (Mr. Benn), who seemed to suggest that the name should be changed from the "House of Lords" to "Sodom and Gomorrah". That would indeed be a revolutionary change, and I should deprecate it. I suggest that there is something in the suggestion that I made in an interjection when the Home Secretary was speaking, namely, that if we are to have ladies in the second Chamber we ought to change the name of the place from the "House of Lords" to the "House of Ladies and Lords". Such a change might help to bring in some of the backwoodsmen.
I fail to see why that suggestion should not be accepted. We always say "Ladies and Gentlemen", and the Germans say "Meine Damen und Herren". It is merely an act of courtesy that the ladies should come first, and I fail to see why that principle should not be applied in this case. It would be an attraction to the life peers who might otherwise be


somewhat reluctant to accept their national responsibilities.
My remedy for the House of Lords can be expressed in even fewer words than were used by my hon. Friend the Member for Bristol, South-East. During the historic controversy which took place between 1908 and 1910 there was an old Radical slogan:
End it, not mend it.

5.54 p.m.

Mr. Frederick Gough: Last night I had the privilege of attending a dinner presided over by my hon. Friend the Member for Aberdeenshire, East (Sir R. Boothby), at which both he and the right hon. Member for Ebbw Vale (Mr. Bevan)contributed very brilliant speeches. However, as after-dinner speeches they did not hold a candle to the speeches which we have heard today from the hon. Member for South Ayrshire (Mr. Emrys Hughes) and the hon. Member for Oldham, West (Mr. Hale).
I hope that the hon. Member for South Ayrshire will not think it an insult when I say that his speech was a very brilliant after-dinner speech, although it was made before that meal. I would remind him, in passing, that at the sort of function that I attended we are inclined to refer to "My Lords, Ladies and Gentlemen." I therefore suggest that the other House should be called the "House of Lords and Ladies," and not the "House of Ladies and Lords." I trust that the hon. Member will forgive me if I do not comment further upon his speech.
It was my misfortune to be abroad during the Second Reading of the Bill. I had intended to come here this afternoon merely to listen and learn, but the right hon. and learned Member for Newport (Sir F. Soskice)—I am sorry that he is not now in his place—so surprised me by putting up what seemed to me to be such a flimsy case that I asked him most politely to amplify his very complicated argument, and he then turned on me and expected me to wind up the debate.
As I understand, he was deploying the argument, first, that life peers will be paid. He was then called to task for being out of order, but, being a quite brilliant Queen's Counsel, he was able, far better than I could do, to put his point

in another way so as to keep within the rules of order. In doing so, however, he completely flummoxed me. He said that if life peers were to be paid, that was one thing, but that if they were not my right hon. Friend the Home Secretary would be guilty of a very grave act of patronage.
I cannot see from the contents of the Bill any suggestion whether life peers are or are not to be paid. That may be something for the future. Neither can I see anything in the Bill which deals with the very brilliant exposition put forward by the hon. Member for Bristol, South-East (Mr. Benn). I was surprised that the hon. Member took the view that once we have had a General Election the will of the people no longer matters, and that it then becomes a matter of the will of Parliament—and that the danger of the House of Lords is that, by virtue of its political majority, it may frustrate a certain Government.

Mr. Benn: As I understand it, under our constitutional practice a Government have the right to govern so long as they retain the confidence of the House of Commons, and that anything in the way of by-elections, or the proceedings in the House of Lords, which interferes with that is contrary to our tradition.

Mr. Gough: I am grateful to the hon. Member. I do not wish to deploy that argument further, but I hope that his party will not carry on the parrot cry of "the will of the people".
The Bill seems to me to be an extremely good one, because it is a step in the right direction. It enables peers who are not part of the hereditary system to sit in another place. I may be wrong—although I do not think that I am—in thinking that the intention of the Bill is to consider the other place in its capacity of a revising Chamber. I think all hon. Members should bear in mind how often we complain of the enormous amount of business which rests upon our shoulders, and those who, rather glibly, speak of doing away with another place, should have second thoughts and realise that the revising value of another place is extremely important.

Mr. Charles Pannell: My hon. Friend the Member for Bristol, South-East (Mr. Benn) did not quarrel with that conception. His argument was that we should leave all the power there


is, but if the House of Lords quashed this House on a matter of major principle, we, by simple resolution, should have the right to override it. Whatever may be said about these life peers—and the hon. Member is trying to be very fair in emphasising the revising functions of another place—no one can suggest that they represent the will of the people. They are appointees.

Mr. Gough: I had passed from discussing the view of the hon. Member for Bristol, South-East. That is why I particularly said that I feel that the Bill should be taken within its context. It is a Bill to deal with the revising function of another place. I feel that this must represent one step in a series of moves affecting another place. Those who oppose the Bill because they are opposed to another Chamber should hold their fire.
If one accepts the Bill on that basis, the arguments of the hon. Lady the Member for Cannock (Miss Lee) and of other hon. Ladies must fall to the ground because they are absolutely against every argument advanced by women, ever since the suffragettes, that women should sit both in this Chamber and in another place. If we accept that the Bill is related mainly to the fact of the other place being a revising Chamber, the wider its representation the better. For that reason particularly, I think it essential, despite the Earl of Glasgow and his feelings, that we should have peeresses in another place.
That is all I wish to say to the House. I am sorry that the right hon. and learned Member for Newport is not present in the Chamber. He challenged me on that point, and that is why I have intervened in the debate.

6.4 p.m.

Mr. Donald Chapman: The Home Secretary said in giving a summary of the Bill today that it was a Measure to reverse the Wensleydale decision of 101 years ago. The debate now, after 100 years, about the reform of the House of Lords has, as was said by my hon. Friend the Member for Bristol, South-East (Mr. Benn) in what I can only describe as a brilliant speech, become hideous and boring. I have had enough of it for the time being, so that tonight I shall be brief. Our main criticism of the Government is that after

101 years they should produce a Measure which is so timid and uncourageous and something which does not bring any real measure of reform.
I ask the Government to look at this Bill, which they have pushed through to a Third Reading, from the point of view of an hon. Member on this side of the House who believes in the need for a second Chamber. I ask the Secretary of State for Scotland to realise what harm this Bill is doing to the cause which some hon. Members on this side of the House are trying to foster, the preservation of a second Chamber. The Bill makes no real breach in the hereditary principle. Time and again the Government have made clear that they will not say anything which will anger those of their supporters who wish to retain the hereditary principle. The Government have been sitting on the fence. That was indicated most recently by the Joint Under-Secretary of State for the Home Department during the Committee stage when, in a sentence obviously designed to placate hon. Members sitting behind him, he said:
The purpose of the Bill is to aid recruitment to the House of Lords, but not to make a fundamental readjustment in its numerical position."—[OFFICIAL REPORT. 25th March, 1958; Vol. 585, c. 325]

Mr. Ede: Hear, hear.

Mr. Chapman: My right hon. Friend says, "Hear, hear"; he agrees with me. It is clear that the Government have been sitting on the fence. They do not want to offend those of their supporters who wish to hang on to the hereditary principle and the domination of hereditary peers. I see that the Secretary of State for Scotland nods his head as well. This is the first way in which this Bill is harming the cause of those of us who are trying to keep the second Chamber flag flying.

Mr. Maclay: I nodded my head at the words of my hon. and learned Friend as quoted by the hon. Member. I consider them to be right in describing the purpose of the Bill, not in the sense in which they have been used by the hon. Member. But I will deal with that later in my speech.

Mr. Chapman: I am sorry—

Mr. Ede: My hon. Friend has referred to the use of double words; that is a very good example.

Mr. Chapman: The Secretary of State must know that, time and again, in the discussions on the Bill I have quoted contrasting opinions of Government spokesmen about its purpose, contrasting and conflicting justifications for it. Out of it all comes only a realisation of the obvious desire of the Government not to anger their own supporters who wish to retain the hereditary principle.
The second way in which the Government are causing harm by the Bill is in their refusal to tackle the question of the powers of the House of Lords. After the Second Reading debate some of us thought we might be beginning to find common ground on which to discuss the whole question of the powers of the House of Lords, only to have our hopes dashed again today by the Home Secretary when he said that the Government had no intention of altering those powers. The right hon. Gentleman said it in such a way as to indicate that the mind of the Government was closed to the idea of discussing the alteration or reduction of the powers of the House of Lords.
As a result of these facts—because it does not deal with the powers of the House of Lords or end the hereditary principle—we have heard from this side of the House ridicule and hatred heaped upon the Bill. Does not the right hon. Gentleman realise that now the great danger is that, in a gale of ridicule, hon. Members on this side of the House will refuse to consider the question of a second Chamber because of the opinions they hold about the House of Lords? To put it in another way, does not he realise that there is very grave danger indeed that the second Chamber "baby" will be thrown out with the House of Lords "bath water"? That is the grave difficulty which faces hon. Members on this side of the House.
The Government appear to be entrenched and defending the hereditary principle and the powers of the Lords as they exist, and, in ridiculing the whole failure of the Conservative Party to meet us on this issue, a Labour Government will have no alternative but to abolish the second Chamber. As one who believes in a second Chamber, non-hereditary and without power, that, as I see it, is the grave harm that the Bill is doing.
If I am wrong, and if there really is a disposition in the Government to show willingness to discuss these two hotly-debated points on which we are so deeply divided, I beg the Government to take the initiative within the next two years and to call an all-party conference on a second Chamber—not on the House of Lords—and to discuss the position of a second Chamber in our Constitution. Hon. Members will remember the exchanges that took place between the Minister of Education and my right hon. Friend the Member for Ebbw Vale (Mr. Bevan) on 13th February, when my right hon. Friend left the door open—I will not put it any higher than that—and it seemed possible that talks could be held to try to work out whether we needed a second Chamber and whether the House of Lords, as reformed, was necessarily the right sort of body.
There is a point upon which we can get agreement. I believe that the Government are passing the Bill now only as an attempt to grope forward to what may happen in the next two or three years, and to see whether there is any possibility of agreement. I tell them that their Bill is doing more and more harm to the possibility of agreement. They ought to try to retrieve the position by proposing the sort of all-party conference which seemed in those interchanges on Second Reading to be satisfactory to the Leader of the Opposition and to my right hon. Friend the Member for Ebbw Vale.
I shall vote against the Bill because it is timid and is doing the great harm to which I have referred. There is still a chance before the Labour Party, feeling that there is no possibility of agreement, will be faced with very little alternative but to abolish the House of Lords altogether.

6.13 p.m.

Major Sir Frank Markham: The hon. Member for Birmingham, Northfield (Mr. Chapman) always speaks with such thoughtfulness and moderation that we listen to him although we might not always agree with his views. This afternoon I find myself so much in agreement with him that I ask him to realise that there is more support on this side for some of the opinions that he has expressed than he gave us credit for.
I would like to offer my remarks under the headings that have already been given. First of all, I would refer to the powers of the second Chamber, and, secondly, to its composition. There must be a second Chamber. It is imperative for this country that legislation should never be rushed through, as it was in the single-Chamber government in Germany or Italy before the war. No Bill should ever become an Act of Parliament without lengthy debate, not based solely upon party principles, in either House. We need a second Chamber of the widest-ranging powers of debate, as it is at the moment, and with powers of suggestion for revision and slight powers of delay. These powers of delay are essential when questions which come before us upon which we have troubled minds and need further information, as was the case when we discussed the Homicide Bill. On such matters the House of Lords, or second Chamber—whatever we like to call it—should have definite powers of delay while opinion is crystallised throughout the country and can be modified as new facts become evident.
I would never, if I could advise on the problem, give the House of Lords, and would never allow it to have again, power to override the Commons on any subject whatever. That power is wrong and obsolete. In a democracy it is almost criminal to give to a hereditary body which is responsible only to itself the power of overriding an elected body. Whatever form the second Chamber or House of Lords takes in the future, I hope there will be no question of according to it in the slightest degree the ultimate power of overriding the Commons. The people, through the House of Commons, must be the basic power within the Commonwealth as we know it. The duties of the House of Lords should be those of debate and revision, or, as Bagheot points out more particularly with regard to the Royal Prerogative, it should have power to advise, encourage and warn.
On the question of composition, I am very much opposed to the hereditary principle in the creation of legislators. I do not believe that legislative ability is automatically passed on to grandchildren. I see no reason why people should sit in the House of Lords today whose sole right to that position is that a great-grandfather was a moderately

successful Victorian politician, or that some even more remote ancestor was a mistress of Charles II. I can see no justification for the hereditary principle being applied to legislation, though, of course, I entirely approve of the hereditary system where the monarchy is concerned. That is a different matter however.
I am one of those who believe in the honours system, but I do not feel happy about hereditary rewards being given for great services to the State. A country like the United States is very much handicapped because there is nothing other than money with which to reward people who have given valuable services to the State. I therefore want the honours system retained, but not the hereditary honours system. The finest reward that Her Majesty can give is not an earldom or a viscountcy or any hereditary honour, but something which is not hereditary, like the Knighthood of the Garter or the Order of Merit. We can retain an honours system which should be personal to the individual who has deserved it, and which is not carried on undeservedly from generation to generation.
The House of Lords has about 900 Members. I do not think any of them should have a hereditary right to go there. The hon. Member for Birmingham, Northfield suggested an all-party conference on the composition of the House of Lords in the not too distant future. I support that suggestion. I think the conference would immediately come to the conclusion that something on the lines of a representative peerage for England should be thought out, as it would give us very great help in creating a better House of Lords.

Mr. Speaker: The hon. Member is now going wider than what is contained in the Bill, and that is out of order in a Third Reading debate.

Sir F. Markham: I bow to your Ruling, Mr. Speaker, and appreciate your leniency in allowing me to make my point before being pulled up. I therefore jump very quickly to the next point, which is that the Bill allows the Prime Minister to advise Her Majesty to create life peers. I regret that it does not go further and take away from the Prime Minister the power of recommending any hereditary peers in the future.
The Bill is so timid that it is only a pace in the direction in which many of us want to go, but it will strengthen the House of Lords. I hope that the creations that are to be made will not consist of the senior Privy Councillor type—

Mr. Ede: Hear, hear.

Sir F. Markham: —but will consist of younger men and women who are able to give really good service. They should not be given as a political reward to someone who is past the stage of fitness in this House.
Any Member of the House of Lords, whether life or hereditary, should have the power to resign. This point was brought out from the Opposition benches in last week's debate. I am strongly of the opinion that peers, like all of us, grow aged and decrepit and decay, and I sometimes think that they grow aged and decrepit and decay more hastily than any other body in the United Kingdom.
The point is that there is obviously an end to their individual usefulness in terms of years. Why should they be kept on in the House of Lords when they themselves know that they are of no further use to the place? Why should they not be allowed, as we in this House are allowed, to take the Chiltern Hundreds or the Manor of Northstead? A decent resignation is the finest termination to any political career, and there are many of us who ought to know that the time of resignation is long before we think it is.
I appreciate the latitude which you have allowed me, Mr. Speaker. At least, it has allowed me to speak frankly and to give the House the doubtful benefit of my views on a second Chamber. I hope that before very long we shall see a second Chamber that is much more democratic in form than the one we have at the moment, which is an absolute misnomer to the word "democracy".

6.22 p.m.

Mr. Ede: One's murky past is always catching up with one. When I listened to the hon. and gallant Member for Buckingham (Sir F. Markham), I recalled that he was not always associated with the people whose views, apparently, he no longer shares but among whom he sits. I want to say a few words, because there is a great deal

of misunderstanding in the Press of what the effect of the Bill will be.
I noticed a few days ago that the Daily Mail, in a comment on the Bill before we completed the Committee stage, said of my right hon. Friend the Leader of the Opposition and his colleagues on the Parliamentary Committee:
They would also be able to transfer a number of 'elder statesmen' who are becoming an embarrassment in the Commons. If Mr. Gaitskell decides on this policy of 'disengagement' the Prime Minister will undoubtedly consult him unofficially before making his choice. In this case, such distinguished Socialists as Herbert Morrison. Chuter Ede and Emanuel Shinwell"—

Mr. E. Shinwell: Leave me out.

Mr. Ede: —
would probably be offered life peerages.
I was perturbed for a start as to whether those three names were in ascending or descending order of merit and distinction until it was pointed out to me that it did not matter very much, because I was in the middle in any event.
I have heard a breath of that in one or two of the speeches today. Let me say to some of my junior colleagues in this House that on the story they tell, that is not the sort of solution that the Government desire. They want to get a few young, energetic Members on this side of the House who sometimes get a bit tired at about eight o'clock in the evening and translate them to a place where, at 5.30, Members talk about "this late hour".
I hope it will be clearly understood that that idea of the Daily Mail's is no way to reform a second Chamber. I sincerely hope that a maximum age will be fixed above which no one will be recommended for a life peerage. I suggest somewhere about 60 or, possibly, 55—[Interruption.]—always a couple of years younger than my hon. Friend the Member for South Ayrshire (Mr. Emrys Hughes).

Mr. Emrys Hughes: I am in favour of 25.

Mr. Ede: This side of the House, in the derision which it has poured on the Bill, has adopted the right attitude towards it. I have greatly enjoyed the speeches of my hon. Friend the Member for Oldham, West (Mr. Hale). He has brought to this discussion just the right


sort of spirit with which we should regard this Measure. Does anyone think that this Measure will do anything to redress the balance between the expression of opinions in the Lords?
Let us imagine that between 1945 and 1950 the Labour Government, which did not lose a by-election, had been confronted with the series of electoral reverses that the present Government have suffered during the past twelve months. There would have been a Prayer against every Statutory Instrument that we had to introduce in another place. Administration would have been made quite impossible. This is a Bill designed carefully to preserve, for use at any time that the majority of the House of Lords considers it its duty to use it, the power to make a Government of the Left impossible in this country.
In contradistinction to my hon. Friend the Member for Northfield (Mr. Chapman), I do not believe that a second Chamber anything like the present second Chamber is needed. The most we need is a body of efficient people to examine the mere language of the Acts of Parliament that we pass. I would not advocate the duty being given to the judges, because in the end they would make of any Act that we pass what they think ought to be the law of the land. There should be an efficient body of administrators who can make quite sure that the words which we use carry out the policies that are advocated when a Measure is put through Parliament. A revising Chamber of that nature is sufficient in a democracy as virile and as understanding as the people of this country have proved themselves to be during the last 150 years.

6.28 p.m.

Mr. G. R. Mitchison: Like my right hon. Friend the Member for South Shields (Mr. Ede), I have listened with great interest, amusement and appreciation to a number of speeches which turned the welcome hose of laughter on to this somewhat ridiculous Bill. Having listened to and welcomed all that, I still think it right to say that I regard the Bill as a mischievous and dishonest bit of nonsense and not without its dangers. I propose to justify those words simply and shortly.
The case for adding life peers to another place is that we will enrich its

debates and, to quote the words of the Home Secretary today, to
add to the dignity and efficiency of public life.
That seems to me to be complete nonsense. The purpose of the House of Lords at present is supposed to be that of a revising Chamber. One hon. Member opposite said that its purpose was that of a debating Chamber. Another hon. Member put its purpose as that of a delaying Chamber. Those are its supposed functions, and it is because of the importance and value of those functions that we are supposed to send an indefinite number of paid or unpaid people of distinction, who may or may not be willing to serve, to enrich what is quite obviously otherwise a completely indefensible institution, whatever one may think about the merits or demerits of second Chambers.
I will take those matters very shortly indeed. I see a case for a revising Chamber, but if I had to devise a revising Chamber it would be nothing like the other place either with or without the life peers. I can see a case for a debating Chambers. They have good ones in Oxford and Cambridge, and they are called the Union in both cases. Why that debating Chamber should be given any special sanctity I do not at present understand.
As to a delaying Chamber, we now come to the more serious side of the matter. It must be remembered that in connection with at least one major Bill of the Labour Government another place did effectively serve as a delaying Chamber for purely party purposes on a purely party question, and that was the Iron and Steel Bill. In another matter which did not raise party issues it differed from the opinion expressed in this Chamber about capital punishment. Those, however, are only two instances. The point is that the other place is at present a Conservative organisation.
It will remain a Conservative organisation after these life peers are added, if they are added, and there has been no suggestion whatever from the benches opposite that it should ever be anything else. Therefore, the extent to which it will exercise its powers of delaying wilt depend not on the merits of what it is delaying, not on the popular support for what it is delaying, but simply and solely on whether it is a Labour Measure, which


the other place thinks it can safely delay without risking its own existence.
The hereditary principle, for any of these purposes, is a piece of nonsense sanctified, if at all, only by its long existence. No sensible and rational person can possibly suppose that a Chamber with any functions whatever ought to be founded on the hereditary principle or ought to have any support from the hereditary principle. Those who make picturesque speeches about the sanction of history in these matters and the rest of it seem to me to be living in some strange world of their own and to be unfit to make recommendations about matters of constitutional importance. I can find no possible justification or reason for it.
That being the position, and the other place at present being a hereditary institution, and an organisation of the Conservative Party for the purpose of delaying the Measures of a Labour Government when it does not like them, we are asked to strengthen that place and to give it support by sending it an unspecified number of paid or unpaid life peers. Does anybody really suggest for a moment that we support anything of the sort? It is not a question of whether we think a second Chamber is a good thing or a bad thing. It is not even a question of what we think are the proper functions of a second Chamber. It is simply a question of looking at what in fact the other place is at present and what purposes it serves at present and then considering whether we are really expected to support this unwelcome proposal, that it should be strengthened for those purposes. It seems to me just as simple as that.
I am not in the least surprised that there was no consultation about this beforehand. The answer was obvious. I am not in the least surprised that noises were made by people less astute than the Home Secretary about this being of assistance to the Labour Party, patronising noises of various kinds about it. Of course, this has been sheer camouflage for what is, after all, the very simplest party manœuvre to give some sort of power and support by this kind of move to an institution which certainly needs it sorely and which is at present fulfilling its functions in a manner highly useful to the Conservative Party as an organisation.
I say no more. There is no need to say any more. There is no broad question involved in this. There is no broad question whether we ought or ought not to have a second Chamber, no broad question of its functions or its powers. Without any change in it, as it is now, we are asked to strengthen it by this Bill in that way. I see no reason whatever for helping the Conservative Party in that matter.

6.36 p.m.

The Secretary of State for Scotland (Mr. John Maclay): I did not realise that the hon. and learned Gentleman the Member for Kettering (Mr. Mitchison) intended to sit down quite so quickly. I was still collecting my thoughts and was taken a little by surprise by the hon. and learned Gentleman. That is why I did not rise immediately he sat down. Therefore, if my words are not as ready as they might have been, I hope that the House will forgive me.

Mr. Mitchison: I so rarely have to apologise in this place for speaking for too short a time that I welcome the opportunity of doing so.

Mr. Maclay: If a few minutes elapse before I get into my full stride I hope that the House will understand why it is.
The easiest way of dealing with this debate is to start with the remark of the hon. and learned Gentleman that this was a mischievous and dishonest piece of nonsense. Those were very tough words for him to use, and I do not think the rest of his speech bore them out. I do not see anything mischievous or dishonest in this Bill. If the hon. and learned Member wanted to press his charge that this is mischievous and dishonest he ought to have gone into greater detail. The Bill quite obviously says what it means.
I come to the remarks of the hon. Member for Birmingham, Northfield (Mr. Chapman), who made a very interesting and, in some ways, a moving speech. I understand his dilemma and appreciate it. I will come to that a bit later. He quoted my hon. and learned Friend the Joint Under-Secretary of State for the Home Department. My hon. and learned Friend, in Committee on the Bill, said:
The purpose of the Bill is to aid recruitment to the House of Lords, but not to make


a fundamental readjustment in its numerical composition."—[OFFICIAL REPORT, 25th March, 1958; Vol. 585, c. 325.]
Both the hon. Member for Northfield and the right hon. Gentleman the Member for South Shields (Mr. Ede) saw something extremely sinister in this. I cannot think why, especially if one considers what my hon. and learned Friend said a few moments after he said what I have just quoted. He went on to say:
This is a limited operation, as has been explained on a number of occasions during the proceedings on the Bill. It is a limited operation, the purpose of which is to enable distinguished people to become peers without their having to become hereditary peers."—[OFFICIAL REPORT, 25th March, 1958; Vol. 585, c. 326.]
Why that should be assumed to be a subtle bolstering up of the hereditary principle, as both the hon. Member and the right hon. Member seemed to be assuming, beats me altogether.
What the Bill does is quite clear. It is an attempt, in present circumstances, we having failed on a number of occasions to get agreement on comprehensive reform of the House of Lords, to do something, not very big, but something useful, to meet the current conditions in which we live. We live at a time when we have many men and women who may be prepared to go to the House of Lords and there contribute to public life, but who are, for various very good reasons, not willing to take hereditary peerages. This Bill will enable them thus to serve. That is what it does and nothing more.

Mr. Chapman: What I said was that the Government were sitting on the fence in considering the hereditary principle, that they did not want to anger their own supporters who believed in the hereditary principle. That is what those words which the right hon. Gentleman has quoted say, and the Joint Under-Secretary of State who said that said it again when he said in the same speech:
It is, therefore, not the intention of the Government that the Bill should … effect a radical change in the composition of the House of Lords … —[OFFICIAL REPORT, 25th March, 1958; Vol. 585, c. 325.]

Mr. Maclay: That is self-evident. That is not the intention. There is no intention—I think I myself said this on Second Reading, and this is the relevance of my hon. and learned Friend's statement—of trying to get a complete party balance

through the use of this Bill. There is no intention of a swamping operation in either direction. If there were, it could be done with hereditary peerages just as well.
The hon. Member for Northfield has been too subtle over this. What I am saying is straightforward, that we merely feel that in present conditions it is highly desirable that the range of people who might be asked to enter the House of Lords should be widened. Why this should be termed mischievous and dishonest beats me. It is absolutely clear and straightforward. If the hon. and learned Member for Kettering still believes that it is mischievous and dishonest, I wish he would tell me how.

Mr. Mitchison: All these arguments are directed to enriching the House of Lords, to theoretical discussions about a second Chamber, and they conceal the obvious purpose of the Measure, which is to strengthen an institution which is exceedingly useful to the Conservative Party. It is for that reason that the Government desire to strengthen it.

Mr. Maclay: All the hon. and learned Gentleman is saying is that he is against a second Chamber in anything approaching the form of the House of Lords, and, therefore, he dislikes the Bill. That is no reason for calling the Bill dishonest, but that is what he has done in what he has just said.

Mr. Mitchison: If the right hon. Gentleman wishes me to explain, perhaps lie will tell us what will be the result of all this in terms of the interests of the Conservative Party. I believe that to be the only reason for the Bill. Until he answers that question, I regard the Bill as a dishonest Measure.

Mr. Maclay: My personal view—I do not know whether or not I am speaking for my colleagues—is that I believe in a second Chamber. I believe that my colleagues do, also. Therefore, if one believes in a second Chamber one must believe that if a change is necessary in a certain set of conditions at a given time in history it is a good thing to make that change. That is straightforward, and there is nothing dishonest about it.
The difficulty about dealing with the whole debate is that we have such a variety of shades of opinion on the other side of the House. We have the straight


abolitionists and the uni-cameralists, those who believe in single-Chamber government. I think that that is a proper definition of the abolitionists as it has emerged from the debate.
Then we have the hon. Member for Bristol, South-East (Mr. Benn), who declares that he is an abolitionist but not a uni-cameralist, which means, I suppose, that he is in favour of a second Chamber to some extent but not the present one. The hon. Member made a very interesting speech. I was intrigued to hear him using the Floor of the House to give some advice to the leaders of his party. Perhaps he could not get them to listen to it in any other part of the building, or perhaps anywhere else. At all events, he gave the Leader of the Opposition a strong hint about what he ought to put in his policy in due course.
Then we come to the next group, those who hold—this is the argument of the hon. Member for Bristol, South-East, too—that the problem is one not of composition but of powers. I believe that I am quoting the hon. Member for Bristol, South-East correctly; I do not want to get it wrong. I think that his argument was that if we solved the powers problem the composition side of it would be easy.
We ought to look into that matter a little further. I think that the hon. Member and many of his hon. Friends agree that there is a place for a revising and debating Chamber. What are the powers? They are the right to revise; and revision must surely involve some element of delay. I agree that how long the delay should be is open to a great deal of argument, but we cannot have an efficient body if it has merely a revising function.
I cannot say that I am at all attracted to the idea of the right hon. Member for South Shields (Mr. Ede), of a body which merely does the work of a Parliamentary draftsman, checking after the Bill is through. I do not think that there is much support for that idea judging by the debates that we have had, but there is substance in the argument that the House of Lords should be a revising and debating Chamber. Then we simply come down to the argument of how long it can delay in its revising task and the other things it has to do.

Mr. Benn: Surely the point is this. Nobody objects to the 99 Amendments which the Lords move and which the Commons accept. The objection is when the Commons do not accept a Lords Amendment. It is on such occasions, I believe, that the will of the Commons should prevail immediately.

Mr. Maclay: The process goes on, backwards and forwards. It is a very useful method of securing wisdom, but what the extent of the delay should be is open to argument. That is the fundamental problem where there is a difference between the two sides.
I would remind those who were arguing that this is a subtle Bill and that we are seeking to do things through the back door, in a dishonest way or whatever it might be, that several times in recent years attempts have been made to ascertain whether there could be useful discussions about a comprehensive reform. We know the fate of the discussions in 1949. We know what happened to the Bryce Report. However, no one can say that this side of the House is irretrievably wedded to the hereditary principle in the House of Lords exactly as it is today. It is clear that there are differences of views among my hon. Friends just as there are on the other side of the House. To say that the Bill is merely a bolstering up artificially of the principle of hereditary peerages is nonsense.
Some specific questions were asked by the right hon. and learned Member for Newport (Sir F. Soskice). He asked about the numbers. He said that he had pressed through all the stages of discussion on the Bill to ascertain how many new peers would be created. I have not been able to check through the Committee stage debates, but I remember it being said on Second Reading—by myself, I think, and certainly by others—that the situation is exactly as the Bill says. There is no limit; there is no maximum or minimum figure in the Bill. Therefore, to ask how many peers will be created implies a complete failure to understand the purpose of the Bill. I repeat—perhaps I shall have to go on doing so ad nauseam, because it needs saying—that it is simply a widening of the existing line of entry to the other House.
If one laid down in the Bill, or had a clear vision in one's mind of the num-


bers that it was wanted to bring into the other House every year, that would not be in accord with the purpose of our definitely limited Bill. We shall have to see what successive Prime Ministers think wise, see who are willing to come and what type of experience is considered desirable, and whether the people who have that experience will be prepared to serve in another place.
It is evidence of misunderstanding of the Bill to ask for a specific reply on the question of numbers. I hope that that question is now answered. The right hon. and learned Gentleman stated that he had repeatedly tried to get an answer on this subject. I have now given it to him, not by saying that I cannot answer it but by saying that the purpose of the Bill is not to lay down a specific number of people. The number will he dictated by the circumstances that I have described.
The right hon. and learned Gentleman's next questions arose from a very complicated procedure. I congratulate him upon having remained in order. They relate to the payments to peers. I hope that Mr. Speaker will look kindly on my attempts to reply without getting into too much trouble. The right hon. and learned Gentleman put a straight question: will the new peers be paid?

Sir F. Soskice: And how much?

Mr. Maclay: And how much?
The answer, as I think the right hon. and learned Gentleman knows very well, is that there is nothing about it in the Bill. That is why we are both in difficulties in speaking about it today. The position in the House of Lords at present is that there is a daily allowance for expenses. There are no other proposals in sight at the moment. However, one thing is very clear. Throughout all the discussions on the Bill concern has been expressed on both sides about the need for some form of payment if the other place is to go on in the way that a great many of us hope it will.
From that, the right hon. and learned Gentleman went into rather extravagant wording. I think that he used the phrase "a new field of undesirable patronage". I assume that that phrase was used because he feels that in the future there may have to be a better method of remuneration than has yet been devised if

people are to give their time to the necessary work in the other place. But why did it necessarily have to be on a lifetime basis, which was really the charge? The right hon. and learned Gentleman's charge was that there would be this very big role of patronage by making appointments which carried, for life, a salary—and the word "pension" was used by someone.
That is not the solution. This matter has to be studied very carefully, because something, sooner or later, may have to be done about payment. But when that is done, it need not open up this horrible spectacle that the right hon. and learned Gentleman suggested of the pension. It could quite easily be done by means of an extension of the expenses principle but, of course, it is too soon to know what the right answer may ultimately prove to be. We have at present these proposals that are being worked on by a Select Committee of the House of Lords, and when some experience is gained on how they work it may point the way to other developments. In other words, in this, as in so many other matters in the British Constitution, we are doing things by stages, and seeing where each stage takes us before we jump too far.
I think that those were the only two clear questions which the right hon. and learned Gentleman asked, although he took ten minutes to ask them, but if there are any more, perhaps he will tell me—

Mr. Bowles: Will all the life peers get the same amount, or will the amount vary according to their own private means?

Mr. Maclay: I thought that I had made it quite clear that this was all very hypothetical, and that there are no proposals in the Bill, or going around; but I frankly accept that, as has emerged from every responsible speech made in this debate, there is a problem which, sooner or later, must be tackled—and it may be sooner rather than later.
The hon. Member for Nuneaton (Mr. Bowles), in an interjection, made a remark that struck me so forcibly that I should like to deal with it. He said that nobody on that side of the House or in the Labour Party throughout the country had any use for a second Chamber. I think that that is almost exactly


what he said, and it is a very sweeping remark to make. I agree that if one goes out into the streets and asks someone what he thinks about the House of Lords one may get a very amusing answer, but how many people have really studied in detail how the House of Lords works in our Constitution?
As it happens—and surprisingly enough, perhaps—I have given quite a number of talks to non-political parties about the functions of the Houses of Parliament—

Mr. Emrys Hughes: And the National Liberal party.

Mr. Maclay: Yes, that is one, and there were a lot there, too.
When it is explained, there is an intense interest in the work of the second Chamber. I know that for years any member of the Labour Party running out of a subject in his speech can always have a rollicking ten minutes at the end by attacking the other place—that is alwaysgood for a cheer—but, equally, one can get extreme interest from almost any audience after one has explained not only the value of its work in helping the House of Commons to produce good legislation, but in the protection to our British constitutional method of government that such a Chamber gives.
I would remind right hon. Gentlemen opposite who do not believe in the principle of two Chambers of the experience we had of single-Chamber government in this country. The Rump Parliament lasted from 19th March, 1649, to December, 1657—if my history is correct—and Cromwell himself brought it to an end. That was uni-cameral government, and of that Parliament Cromwell himself said that
It was the horridest arbitrariness that ever existed.

Mr. Emrys Hughes: What did he do?

Mr. Maclay: He went back to the two-Chamber system.

Mr. David Jones: But will the right hon. Gentleman admit that in New Zealand they have had uni-cameral government for the last eight years, and that it has done the job very well?

Mr. Maclay: The hon. Gentleman will realise that almost as soon as that second Chamber was abolished the Government of the day appointed a committee to see whether or not a second Chamber should be recreated, and that committee reported that it should be created again. I think that I am right in saying that—

Mr. Jones: But nothing has happened since.

Mr. Maclay: It was realised in New Zealand that, the second Chamber having been abolished, the subject had to be re-examined very carefully, and those appointed to examine it reported in favour of two-Chamber government.

Mr. Jones: But nothing has happened since.

Mr. Maclay: Summing up, I repeat what has been said so often in this debate. The charge that there is something sinister and dangerous in this Bill is, of course, nonsense. I accept that one of the purposes of the Bill is to see that the second Chamber, which performs such an invaluable function, has its composition in line with what modern conditions demand. I believe that it is essential, in present conditions, that if the Prime Minister of the day wants to recommend the appointment of new peers he should not be limited to those who are prepared to accept hereditary peerages.
I am convinced that this Bill can be a very useful step forward in our constitutional history, and, in spite of what has been said on the other side, I sincerely hope that the House will give it its support.

Question put, That the Bill be now read the Third time:—

The House divided: Ayes 292, Noes 241.

Division No. 84.]
AYES
[7.1 p.m.


Agnew, Sir Peter
Arbuthnot, John
Balniel, Lord


Allan, R. A. (Paddington, S.)
Ashton, H.
Barber, Anthony


Alport, C. J. M.
Astor, Hon. J. J.
Barlow, Sir John


Amery, Julian (Preston, N.)
Atkins, H. E.
Barter, John


Amory,Rt.Hn.Heathcoat(Tiverton)
Baldock, Lt.-Cmdr. J. M.
Baxter, Sir Beverley


Anstruther-Gray, Major Sir William
Baldwin, A. E.
Beamish, Col. Tufton




Bell, Philip (Bolton, E.)
Grimston, Hon. John (St. Albans)
Maddan, Martin


Bell, Ronald (Bucks, S.)
Grimston, Sir Robert (Westbury)
Maitland, Cdr. J. F. w. (Horncastle)


Bennett, F. M. (Torquay)
Gurden, Harold
Maitland, Hon. Patrick (Lanark)


Bennett, Dr. Reginald
Hall, John (Wycombe)
Markham, Major Sir Frank


Bevins, J. R. (Toxteth)
Hare, Rt. Hon. J. H.
Marlowe, A. A. H.


Bidgood, J, C.
Harris, Reader (Heston)
Marples, Rt. Hon. A. E.


Bingham, R. M.
Harrison, A. B. C. (Maldon)
Marshall, Douglas


Birch, Rt. Hon. Nigel
Harrison, Col. J. H. (Eye)
Mathew, R.


Bishop, F. P.
Harvey,Sir Arthur Vere(Macclesf'd)
Maudling, Rt. Hon. R.


Black, c. W.
Harvey, Ian (Harrow, E.)
Mawby, R. L.


Body, R. F.
Harvey, John (Walthamstow, E.)
Maydon, Lt.-Comdr. S. L. C.


Boothby, Sir Robert
Harvie-Watt, Sir George
Milligan, Rt. Hon. W. R.


Bossom, Sir Alfred
Hay, John
Molson, Rt. Hon. Hugh


Boyd-Carpenter, Rt. Hon. J. A.
Head, Rt. Hon. A. H.
Moore, Sir Thomas


Boyle, Sir Edward
Heald, Rt. Hon. Sir Lionel
Morrison, John (Salisbury)


Braine, B. R.
Heath, Rt. Hon. E. R. G.
Mott-Radclyffe, Sir Charles


Braithwaite,Sir Albert(Harrow,W.)
Henderson, John (Cathcart)
Nabarro, G. D. N.


Bromley-Davenport, Lt.-Col. W. H.
Hesketh, R. F.
Nairn, D. L. S.


Brooke, Rt. Hon. Henry
Hicks-Beach, Maj. W. W.
Neave, Airey


Brooman-White, R. C.
Hill, Rt. Hon. Charles (Luton)
Nicholls, Harmar


Browne, J. Nixon (Craigton)
Hill, Mrs. E. (Wythenshawe)
Nicholson, Sir Godfrey (Farnham)


Bryan, P.
Hill, John (S. Norfolk)
Nicolson, N. (B'n'm'th, E. &amp; Chr'ch)


Bullus, Wing Commander E. E.
Hirst, Geoffrey
Noble, Comdr. Rt. Hon. Allan


Butcher, Sir Herbert
Hobson, John (Warwick &amp; Leam'gt'n)
Nugent, G. R. H.


Butler,Rt.Hn.R.A.(Safrron Walden)
Holland-Martin, C. J.
O'Neill, Hn. Phelim (Co. Antrim,N.)


Carr, Robert
Hope, Lord John
Ormsby-Gore, Rt. Hon. W. D.


Cary, Sir Robert
Hornby, R. P.
Orr-Ewing, Charles Ian (Hendon, N.)


Channon, Sir Henry
Hornsby-Smith, Miss M. P.
Osborne, C.


Chichester-Clark, R.
Howard, Gerald (Cambridgeshire)
Page, R. G.


Clarke, Brig. Terence(Portsmth,W.)
Howard, Hon. Greville (St. Ives)
Pannell, N. A. (Kirkdale)


Cole, Norman
Howard, John (Test)
Partridge, E.


Conant, Maj. Sir Roger
Hughes Hallett, Vice-Admiral J.
Peel, W. J.


Cooke, Robert
Hulbert, Sir Norman
Peyton, J. W. W.


Cooper, A. E.
Hurd, A. R.
Pickthorn, K. W. M.


Cooper-Key, E. M.
Hutchison, Sir Ian Clark (E'b'gh, W.)
Pike, Miss Mervyn


Cordeaux, Lt.-Col. J. K.
Hutchison, Sir James (Scotstoun)
Pilkington, Capt. R. A.


Corfield, Capt. F. V.
Hutchison, Michael Clark (E'b'gh, S.)
Pitman, I. J.


Craddock, Beresford (Spelthorne)
Hyde, Montgomery
Pitt, Miss E. M.


Crosthwaite-Eyre, Col. O. E.
Hylton-Foster, Rt. Hon. Sir Harry
Price, David (Eastleigh)


Crowder,Petre(Ruislip—Northwood)
Iremonger, T. L.
Price, Henry (Lewisham, W.)


Currie, G. B. H.
Jenkins, Robert (Dulwich)
Prior-Palmer, Brig. O. L.


Dance, J. C. G.
Jennings, J. C. (Burton)
Profumo, J. D.


Davidson, viscountess
Jennings, Sir Roland (Hallam)
Rawlinson, Peter


D'Avigdor-Goldsmid, Sir Henry
Johnson, Dr. Donald (Carlisle)
Redmayne, M.


Deedes, W. F.
Johnson, Eric (Blackley)
Rees-Davies, W. R.


Digby, Simon Wingfield
Jones, Rt. Hon. Aubrey (Hall Green)
Remnant, Hon. P.


Dodds-Parker, A. D.
Joseph, Sir Keith
Renton, D. L. M.


Donaldson, Cmdr. C. E. McA.
Joynson-Hicks, Hon. Sir Lancelot
Ridsdale, J. E.


Drayson, G. B.
Kaberry, D.
Rippon, A. G. F.


du Cann, E. D. L.
Keegan, D.
Roberts, Sir Peter (Heeley)


Dugdale, Rt. Hn. Sir T. (Richmond)
Kerby, Capt. H. B.
Robertson, Sir David


Duncan, Sir James
Kerr, Sir Hamilton
Rodgers, John (Sevenoaks)


Duthle, W. S.
Kershaw, J. A.
Roper, Sir Harold


Eccles, Rt. Hon. Sir David
Kimball, M.
Ropner, Col. Sir Leonard


Eden, J. B. (Bournemouth, West)
Kirk, p. M.
Sandys, Rt. Hon. D.


Elliott, R.W.(Ne'catleuponTyne,N.)
Lagden, G. W.
Scott-Miller, Cmdr. R.


Emmet, Hon. Mrs. Evelyn
Lambton, Viscount
Sharples, R. C.


Errington, Sir Eric
Langford-Holt, J. A.
Shepherd, William


Erroll, F. J.
Leather, E. H. C.
Simon, J. E. S. (Middlesbrough, W.)


Farey-Jones, F. W.
Leavey, J. A.
Smithers, Peter (Winchester)


Finlay, Graeme
Leburn, W. G.
Smyth, Brig. Sir John (Norwood)


Fisher, Nigel
Legge-Bourke, MaJ. E. A. H.
Soames, Rt. Hon. Christopher


Fletcher-Cooke, C.
Legh, Hon. Peter (Petersfield)
Spearman, Sir Alexander


Forrest, G.
Lennox-Boyd, Rt. Hon. A. T.
Speir, R. M.


Fort, R.
Lindsay, Hon. James (Devon, N.)
Spence, H. R. (Aberdeen, W.)


Fraser, Hon. Hugh (Stone)
Lindsay, Martin (Solihull)
Spens, Rt. Hn. Sir P. (Kens'gt'n, S.)


Fraser, Sir Ian (M'cmbe &amp; Lonsdale)
Linstead, Sir H. N.
Stanley, Capt. Hon. Richard


Freeth, Denzil
Llewellyn, D. T.
Stevens, Geoffrey


Galbraith, Hon. T. G. D.
Lloyd, Rt. Hon. G. (Sutton Coldfield)
Steward, Harold (Stockport, S.)


Gammans, Lady
Lloyd, Maj. Sir Guy (Renfrew, E.)
Steward, Sir William (Woolwich, W.)


Garner-Evans, E. H.
Lloyd Rt. Hon. Selwyn (Wirral)
Stoddart-Scott, Col. Sir Malcolm


George, J. C. (Pollok)
Longden, Gilbert
Storey, S.


Gibson-Watt, D.
Lucas, P. B. (Brentford &amp; Chiswick)
Stuart, Rt. Hon. James (Moray)


Glover, D.
Lucas-Tooth, Sir Hugh
Studholme, Sir Henry


Glyn, Col. Richard H.
McAdden, S. J.
Summers, Sir Spencer


Godber, J. B.
Macdonald, Sir Peter
Sumner, w. D. M. (Orpington)


Gomme-Duncan, Col. Sir Alan
McKibbin, Alan
Taylor, Sir Charles (Eastbourne)


Gough, C. F. H.
Mackie, J. H. (Galloway)
Taylor, William (Bradford, N.)


Gower, H. R.
Maclay, Rt. Hon. John
Teeling, W.


Graham, Sir Fergus
Maclean, Sir Fitzroy (Lancaster)
Temple, John M.


Grant, W. (Woodside)
McLean, Neil (Inverness)
Thomas, Leslie (Canterbury)


Grant-Ferris, Wg.Cdr.R.(Nantwich)
Macmillan, Maurice (Halifax)
Thompson, Kenneth (Walton)


Green, A.
Macpherson, Niall (Dumfries)
Thompson, R. (Croydon, S.)


Gresham Cooke, R.









Thorneycroft, Rt. Hon. P.
Vickers, Miss Joan
Whitelaw, W. S. I.


Thornton-Kemsley, Sir Colin
Vosper, R. Hon. D. F.
Williams, Paul (Sunderland, S.)


Tiley, A. (Bradford, W.)
Wakefield, Edward (Derbyshire, W.)
Williams, R. Dudley (Exeter)


Tilney, John (Wavertree)
Wakefield, sir Wavell (St.M'lebone)
Wilson, Geoffrey (Truro)


Turner, H. F. L.
Walker-Smith, Rt. Hon. Derek
Wood, Hon. R.


Turton, Rt. Hon. R. H.
Wall, Patrick
Woollam, John Victor


Tweedsmuir, Lady
Ward, Rt. Hon. G. R. (Worcester)



Vane, W. M. F.
Ward, Dame Irene (Tynemouth)
TELLERS FOR THE AYES:


Vaughan-Morgan, J. K.
Webbe, Sir H.
Mr. Oakshott and Mr. Wills.




NOES


Ainsley, J. W.
George,Lady Megan Lloyd (Car'then)
Mikardo, Ian


Albu, A. H.
Gooch, E. G.
Mitchison, G. R.


Allaun, Frank (Salford, E.)
Greenwood, Anthony
Monslow, W.


Allen, Arthur (Bosworth)
Grenfell, Rt. Hon. D. R.
Moody, A. S.


Allen, Scholefield (Crewe)
Grey, C. F.
Morris, Percy (Swansea, W.)


Anderson, Frank
Griffiths, David (Rother Valley)
Morrison,Rt.Hn.Herbert(Lewis'm,S.)


Awbery, S. S.
Griffiths, Rt. Hon James (Llanelly)
Mort, D. L.


Bacon, Miss Alice
Griffiths, William (Exchange)
Moss, R.


Baird, J.
Hale, Leslie
Moyle, A.


Balfour, A.
Hall, Rt. Hn. Glenvil (Colne Valley)
Mulley, F. W.


Bellenger, Rt. Hon. F. J.
Hannan, W.
Noel-Baker, Francis (Swindon)


Benn, Hn. Wedgwood (Bristol, S.E.)
Harrison, J. (Nottingham, N.)
Noel-Baker,Rt. Hon. P. (Derby, S.)


Benson, Sir George
Hastings, S.
O'Brien, Sir Thomas


Beswick, Frank
Hayman, F. H.
Oliver, G. H.


Bevan, Rt. Hon. A. (Ebbw Vale)
Healey, Denis
Oram, A. E.


Blackburn, F.
Henderson, Rt. Hn. A. (Rwly Regis)
Oswald, T.


Blenkinsop, A.
Hewitson, Capt. M.
Owen, W. J.


Blyton, W. R.
Hobson, C. R. (Keighley)
Padley, W. E.


Boardman, H.
Holman, P.
Paget, R. T.


Bonham-Carter, Capt. M. R.
Holt, A. F.
Paling, Rt. Hon. W. (Dearne Valley)


Bottomley, Rt. Hon. A. G.
Houghton, Douglas
Palmer, A. M. F.


Bowden, H. W. (Leicester, S.W.)
Howell, Charles (Perry Barr)
Pannell, Charles (Leeds, W.)


Bowen, E. R. (Cardigan)
Howell, Denis (All Saints)
Pargiter, G. A.


Bowles, F. G.
Hoy, J. H.
Parker, J.


Boyd, T. C.
Hughes, Cledwyn (Anglesey)
Parkin, B. T.


Braddock, Mrs. Elizabeth
Hughes, Emrys (S. Ayrshire)
Paton, John


Brockway, A. F.
Hughes, Hector (Aberdeen, N.)
Pearson, A.


Brown, Rt. Hon. George (Belper)
Hunter, A. E.
Peart, T. F.


Burke, W. A.
Hynd, H. (Accrington)
Pentland, N.


Burton, Miss F. E.
Hynd, J. B. (Attercliffe)
Prentice, R. E.


Butler, Herbert (Hackney, C.)
Irvine, A. J. (Edge Hill)
Price, J. T. (Westhoughton)


Butler, Mrs. Joyce (Wood Green)
Irving, Sydney (Dartford)
Price, Philips (Gloucestershire, W.)


Callaghan, L. J.
Isaacs, Rt. Hon. G. A.
Probert, A. R.


Carmichael, J.
Janner, B.
Proctor, W. T.


Castle, Mrs. B. A.
Jay, Rt. Hon. D. P. T.
Pryde, D. J.


Champion, A. J.
Jeger, George (Goole)
Pursey, Cmdr. H.


Chapman, W. D.
Jeger, Mrs. Lena(Holbn &amp; St.Pncs,S.)
Randall, H. E.


Chetwynd, G. R.
Jenkins, Roy (Stechford)
Rankin, John


Clunie, J.
Johnson, James (Rugby)
Redhead, E. C.


Coldrick, W.
Johnston, Douglas (Paisley)
Reeves, J.


Collick, P. H. (Birkenhead)
Jones, Rt. Hon. A. Creech(Wakefield)
Reid, William


Collins,V.J.(Shoreditch &amp; Finsbury)
Jones, David (The Hartlepools)
Rhodes, H.


Corbet, Mrs. Freda
Jones, Elwyn (W. Ham, S.)
Roberts, Rt. Hon. A.


Cove, W. G.
Jones, Jack (Rotherham)
Roberts, Albert (Normanton)


Craddock, George (Bradford, S.)
Jones, j. Idwal (Wrexham)
Roberts, Goronwy (Caernarvon)


Cronin, J. D.
Jones, T. W. (Merioneth)
Robinson, Kenneth (St. Pancras, N.)


Crossman, R. H. S.
Key, Rt. Hon. C.W.
Rogers, George (Kensington, N.)


Dalton, Rt. Hon. H.
King, Dr. H. M.
Ross, William


Darling, George (Hillsborough)
Lawson, G. M.
Royle, C.


Davies, Ernest (Enfield, E.)
Lee, Frederick (Newton)
Shinwell, Rt. Hon. E.


Davies, Harold (Leek)
Lee, Miss Jennie (Cannock)
Shurmer, P. L. E.


Davies, Stephen (Merthyr)
Lindgren, G. S.
Silverman, Julius (Aston)


de Freitas, Geoffrey
Lipton, Marcus
Silverman, Sydney (Nelson)


Delargy, H. J.
Logan, D. G.
Simmons, C. J. (Brierley Hill)


Diamond, John
McAlister, Mrs. Mary
Skeffington, A. M.


Dodds, N. N.
McCann, J.
Slater, J. (Sedgefield)


Donnelly, D. L.
MacCoil, J. E.
Sorensen, R. W.


Dye, S.
McGhee, H. G.
Soskice, Rt. Hon. Sir Frank


Ede, Rt. Hon. J. C.
McInnes, J.
Sparks, J. A.


Edelman, M.
McKay, John (Wallsend)
Steele, T.


Edwards, Rt. Hon. John (Brighouse)
McLeavy, Frank
Stewart, Michael (Fulham)


Edwards, Rt. Hon. Ness (Caerphilly)
MacMillan, M. K. (Western Isles)
Storehouse, John


Edwards, Robert (Bilston)
MacPherson, Malcolm (Stirling)
Stones, W. (Consett)


Edwards, W. J. (Stepney)
Mahon, Simon
Strachey, Rt. Hon. J.


Evans, Albert (Islington, S.W.)
Mallalieu, E. L. (Brigg)
Strauss, Rt. Hon. George (Vauxhall)


Evans, Edward (Lowestoft)
Mallalieu, J. P. W. (Huddersfd, E.)
Stross,Dr.Barnett(Stoke-on-Trent,C.)


Fernyhough, E.
Marquand, Rt. Hon. H. A.
Summerskill, Rt. Hon. E.


Finch, H. J.
Mason, Roy
Swingler, S. T.


Fletcher, Eric
Mayhew, C. P.
Sylvester, G. O.


Foot, D. M.
Mellish, R. J.
Taylor, Bernard (Mansfield)


Fraser, Thomas (Hamilton)
Messer, Sir F.
Taylor, John (West Lothian)


Gaitskell, Rt. Hon. H. T. N.









Thomas, Iorwerth (Rhondda, W.)
West, D. G.
Willis, Eustace (Edinburgh, E.)


Thomson, George (Dundee, E.)
Wheeldon, W. E.
Wilson, Rt. Hon. Harold (Huyton)


Thornton, E.
White, Mrs. Eirene (E. Flint)
Winterbottom, Richard


Tomney, F.
Wigg, George
Woodburn, Rt. Hon. A.


Ungoed-Thomas, Sir Lynn
Wilcock, Group Capt. C. A. B.
Woof, R. E.


Viant, S. P.
Willey, Frederick
Yates, V. (Ladywood)


Watkins, T. E.
Williams, David (Neath)
Zilliacus, K.


Weitzman, D
Williams, Rt. Hon. T. (Don Valley)



Wells, Percy (Faversham)
Williams, W. R. (Openshaw)
TELLERS FOR THE NOES.


Wells, William (Walsall, N.)
Williams, W. T. (Barons Court)
Mr. Short and Mr. Deer.

Bill accordingly read the Third time and passed, without Amendment.

HOUSE OF COMMONS (REDISTRIBUTION OF SEATS) BILL

Order for Third Reading read.

7.8 p.m.

The Joint Under-Secretary of State for Scotland (Mr. Niall Macpherson): I beg to move, That the Bill be now read the Third time.
The House will not expect me to say more than a few words in moving the Third Reading of the Bill. My hon. and learned Friend the Joint Under-Secretary of State for the Home Department will be glad to reply to any matters which may be raised in the debate. For my part, I shall confine myself to three short points.
The main characteristic of the proceedings on the Bill has been the equable and objective tone of the discussion. Indeed, it can be fairly claimed that, in general, this is an agreed Measure. It originated in criticisms made of the 1949 Act during the debates in 1954 and 1955 on the first periodical reports of the Boundary Commissions and in subsequent discussions which took place between the parties. There was broad agreement, first, that general reviews should take place less frequently; secondly, that the boundaries of counties and county boroughs and Metropolitan boroughs should be cut across as little as possible, even if the result was some disparity between neighbouring electorates or, as the Manchester Guardian headline put it—paraphrasing, perhaps, what the right hon. Member for South Shields (Mr. Ede) had said—
Local ties more important than mathematics
Thirdly, there was general agreement on the need to recast the meaning of the phrase "electoral quota".
Broadly speaking, the Bill gives effect to the changes desired by the House. The only major point at issue was whether the number of seats for Great Britain should be increased so as to allow an electoral

quota for England more closely in line with the Scottish and Welsh electoral quotas. But, as my right hon. Friend the Attorney-General said last Thursday:
That discrepancy between the electorates originated in the recommendations of the Speakers' Conference, if not before …
and he went on to say:
the correction of this discrepancy between the different parts of the United Kingdom is a subject not for this Bill but for consideration at another Speaker's Conference, when the time comes for such a conference."—[OFFICIAL REPORT, 27th March, 1958; Vol. 585, c. 667–8.]
My second point is this. Practically all the argument has dealt with England. Indeed, if I may say so, not only does the Bill, in one respect, give statutory effect to what was already the practice in Scotland—namely, that the deputy-chairman of the Commission should he a judge of the High Court, or, in Scotland, the Court of Session—but, also, the House has endorsed and applauded the form in which the Scottish Commission submitted its Report. The Scottish Commission's handling of redistribution was found generally acceptable and, as a Scottish Minister, it is only right that I should use this opportunity to recall the debt that we owe to Lord Mackintosh and his colleagues.
I would recall the words of the right hon. Member for South Shields in the 1954 debate, when he said:
I have rarely read a parliamentary document which gave me as much pleasure as the Report of the Boundary Commission for Scotland."—[OFFICIAL REPORT, 15th December. 1954; Vol. 535, c. 1791].
One of the things in it that pleased him, I think, was that the Commission gave reasons for its recommendations. While it is one thing for the Scottish Commission to elaborate its reasons for the comparatively small number of cases in which changes of constituency boundaries were proposed in Scotland and quite a different thing in the much larger and more densely populated country on the south side of the Border, it is, nevertheless, significant that right hon. and hon.


Gentlemen on both sides of the House have suggested that the task of the Home Secretary and of the House alike would be made easier if reasons for recommendations were given by Boundary Commissions.
My last point refers to a subject which has been hardly mentioned in the discussions, namely, Clause 4 of the Bill, which relates to publication of notices by the Boundary Commission and the holding of inquiries. The provisions contained therein will make it clear to all concerned that the procedure of the Commissions manifests, if possible, even more clearly than in the past, the three basic characteristics which the Franks Committee considers that tribunals should display—openness, fairness and impartiality." By the same token the provisions will give local opinion more opportunity to express itself concerning changes proposed. We are thus furthering, once again, local interest in local affairs.
Mr. Speaker, it is not often that we have an opportunity of expressing our thanks to you. I am sure that I am speaking for the whole House in thanking you very sincerely for continuing, as Chairman, to preside over all the Boundary Commissions.

7.14 p.m.

Mr. G. R. Mitchison: The Minister is quite right in saying that, so far as we can now discuss the Bill, it is substantially an agreed Measure. There is one point that I should like to raise under Clause 2. It is, to put it shortly, the relation of the new consideration introduced by subsection (2) to the other rules which was fully discussed in Committee. I do not propose to repeat the discussion, because an undertaking was given on behalf of the Government that the matter would be looked at again and that any necessary or appropriate correction would be made in another place. Subject to that, the text of the Bill is agreed.
The hon. Gentleman rightly called attention to the relation between the electoral quota and the number of seats allotted to different parts of the United Kingdom. In our view, too, those matters are related, and in that and other respects we proposed additions to the Bill which the Government refused in Committee.

I shall not refer to them. I merely say that those additions were rejected unilaterally without discussion or agreement by the Government.
We did not press the proposal about the number of seats to a division because we felt that the information before us was not sufficient to provide the appropriate number, and we said so. But we must reserve the right to make unilaterally such alterations as the Government rejected unilaterally the other day. The reference to the Speaker's Conference came entirely from Government spokesmen and received no endorsement or approval from our side. The Government acted unilaterally in rejecting our proposals. They must not be surprised if we, in our turn, act unilaterally, too.
I want to make that clear so that no misunderstanding should arise out of the fact that so much of the Bill, or, indeed, subject to the one point that I have already mentioned, the whole text of the Bill, represents an agreement, and I am glad to feel that there has been agreement, particularly on the question of the longer period between periodical reviews. Obviously, there was not merely a feeling among parties, but a feeling among individual hon. Members that what happened last time was a disturbance from their point of view and from the point of view of the electorates that might have been avoided and which should certainly not be allowed to occur too often.
On that point and the other points in the Bill, including the one under Clause 4, we shall not oppose this Measure. We shall, indeed, welcome it.

7.19 p.m.

Mr. Arthur Skeffington: I should like to begin by making one comment which goes some way towards confirming that what the Minister said about there being little between the two sides of the House is correct. The hon. Gentleman referred to a comment in the Manchester Guardian. I remember that during the discussion on the Provisional Orders in December, 1954, and the debates that took place then, sometimes very late at night and always with a full house, there was considerable difference between the two sides of the House.
The Manchester Guardian then suggested that hon. Members could be


expected to be greatly concerned in this matter because little pigs are interested in the price of pork. There have not been nearly so many little pigs interested in the price of pork in this debate, partly, no doubt, because a review was a long way off, but primarily, I hope, because one feels that the new directions being given to the Commissioners will not result in the widespread changes which shocked both sides of the House on previous occasions.
I feel that the discussions that we had in December, 1954, and the discussions that we had in Committee and on Second Reading were overwhelmingly worth while in that the Boundary Commissions can be in no doubt about the genuine feeling of hon. Members on both sides. It can be summed up in the phrase, "Do not alter boundaries unless there is an overwhelming case."
As a result of our discussions in December, 1954, a number of new and, I think, helpful directions have emerged. It is, for example, a good thing that the failure to hold public inquiries, a fault of the English Commission in the past, will not be likely to occur in any future review.
I am certain that one of the reasons why the English recommendations had such a bad reception in the House was that no one knew the reasons for the changes suggested. It would also appear that the large number of alterations in boundaries which were made in certain of the large cities to secure the reduction of, perhaps, one constituency, very often infringing local government boundaries as well as disturbing groups of electors, as in the classic example of Southampton, will not be possible under the new Bill. For all these reasons, the Bill goes a considerable way to allaying the fears which many of us entertain.
If the case for a permanent Boundary Commission is accepted, although I am still not convinced of the need for it, it will be a much better Commission as a result of the directions in this Bill. I am particularly glad that Clause 4, to which the Joint Under-Secretary referred in opening, means that electors or groups of individuals will have an opportunity of presenting a case at a public inquiry when they feel that the Commission's proposals for alteration are unfair or unsatisfactory.
I only wish that the Bill had been able to deal with the under-representation in this House of Members for English constituencies. I cannot trespass on that on Third Reading, but it is a matter to which, no doubt, we shall be able to return in future. I also hope that there will be opportunity of considering again the direct right of access of local authorities to the Home Secretary in cases when they feel that there are genuine anomalies. Local authorities could be trusted to make responsible representations direct to the Home Secretary with the certainty under the Constitution of getting an answer.
I believe that all these discussions, both on the Bill and in 1954, have led to the emergence of whatI hope the Commissions will consider to be the sovereign rule of redistribution: that is, that a constituency should not be interfered with unless the case is overwhelmingly justified. Members of Parliament cannot do their job so well if there are frequent alterations in the people they represent. Electors, even those who may be opposed politically to their Member of Parliament, cherish the relation which grows up between a Member and his constituency, who, once he is elected, represents all the people of the area. Too frequent alterations in boundaries rupture something which has been an essential part of House of Commons life.
If the Boundary Commissioners in the four Commissions work on the principle that only when a constituency becomes very large or very small indeed is there need to make a change, the result of our discussions will be abundantly worth-while. I am sure that all hon. Members hope that, as a result of the Bill, the difficulties that we experienced in the past will not arise in the future.

7.23 p.m.

The Joint Under-Secretary of State for the Home Department (Mr. David Renton): I am sure that the whole House will agree with what the hon. Member for Hayes and Harlington (Mr. Skeffington) has said. It is a pleasant change to find that one does not disagree with anything which he has put forward on the Bill. I especially underline what the hon. Member said about not making changes unless there is a clear case for doing so. To say that there should be no change unless there is an overwhelming case may be putting it a little strongly, but I agree


with the general spirit of the hon. Member's remarks. He was right also to stress the value of the introduction into the Bill of Clause 4 with the public inquiry procedure.
The hon. and learned Member for Kettering (Mr. Mitchison) made two points upon which I should comment. First, he referred to the fact that at an earlier stage he had asked my right hon. and learned Friend the Attorney-General whether there could be a slight amendment to Clause 2 (2) to emphasise and clarify the exact position which Rule 4 is to occupy in relation to the other rules. My right hon. and learned Friend cannot be here this evening, for reasons which may be familiar to the House; he has had to go abroad to represent the United Kingdom. He has, however, asked me to say that he has already considered further the question whether greater precision could be introduced into the exception made in Clause 2 (2) for constituency alterations made for the purpose of Rule 4.
The House will, however, remember that in Committee my right hon. and learned Friend the Attorney-General gave the warning that it was a difficult matter and that it might not be possible to make the subsection any clearer than it is. My right hon. and learned Friend has asked me to say that, having given the most careful consideration to the point, he regrets that it has not been found possible to devise a form of words which would give yet further precision and, at the same time, avoid the risk of either unduly extending or unduly restricting the generality of the subsection. I am sure that the hon. and learned Member for Kettering understands that that is often a difficulty with which the draftsman is faced. It is in no sense peculiar to the drafting of this subsection.
The hon. and learned Member made a surprising and, I say in all candour, a completely false point in suggesting that Opposition proposals during confidential discussions between the leaders of the party before the drafting of the Bill were rejected without discussion. In fact, as his hon. Friend the Member for Hayes and Harlington said, there were discussions.

Mr. Mitchison: I made no such suggestion.

Mr. Renton: The hon. and learned Member will forgive me if I misheard him, but I clearly understood the purport of his remarks to refer to discussions, not in proceedings on the Bill, but prior to the Bill.

Mr. Mitchison: No. I am sorry if I did not make myself clear. What I said was that the text of the Bill as we have it now, subject to the minor point in Clause 2 (2), represents an agreement. I do not know whether I said it was an agreement actually arrived at before the Bill appeared, but that is what it represents. There is no difference between us on that.
The only other point I made was that, apart from that agreement, we put forward certain proposals in the Committee stage, to which I should not be in order in referring now, but as to each and every one of which I say that they were rejected unilaterally by the Government. There was no agreement about them, and never had been, and we reserve our right to return to those proposals. No suggestion was made at any stage that any one of them represented any breach of the agreement that had been reached.

Mr. Renton: I am obliged to the hon. and learned Member for that amount of clarification of his earlier statement, in which he used the phrase "without discussion", which it was surprising for him to use bearing in mind the full discussion which we had on the Amendments which were eventually left on the Notice Paper by the Opposition. We had a full and extremely good discussion on each of those Amendments and it was treated by both sides as essentially a House of Commons matter. The Government most certainly gave very careful consideration and reasoned arguments on each of those Amendments. It so happens that we were not able to accept them, and there it is.

Mr. Mitchison: I am seeking no quarrel with the hon. and learned Gentleman about this. There is no difference between us. I do not remember the exact context in which I used the words "without discussion", but I certainly did not mean to say that we did not have a very full, interesting and adequate discussion on each of the Amendments which we put forward, save, possibly, one which I have forgotten or one which


might have been withdrawn. On every one which came before us in Committee, certainly we had adequate discussion. There is no dispute about that.
All I am saying is that we were turned down unilaterally by the Government and we reserve the right to introduce those matters again as and when the occasion arises.

Mr. Speaker: It would be better, perhaps, if both hon. and learned Gentlemen would keep to the Bill as it is before the House. We have finished the Committee stage long ago.

Mr. Renton: I am obliged, Mr. Speaker.
Throughout these proceedings, we have managed to maintain a very friendly atmosphere and I am only sorry if any misunderstanding between the hon. and learned Member and myself should in any way spoil it.

Question put and agreed to.

Bill accordingly read the Third time and passed.

POLICE PENSIONS

7.32 p.m.

The Joint Under-Secretary of State for the Home Department (Mr. David Renton): I beg to move,
That the Draft Police Pensions (No. 2) Regulations, 1958, a copy of which was laid before this House on 11th March, be approved.
These draft Regulations have two purposes. They provide for the commutation of police pensions—

Mr. Speaker: May I interrupt the hon. and learned Gentleman? I have read the Regulations. The English and Scottish Regulations appear to contain practically identical provisions. Is it convenient, therefore, to both sides of the House to discuss, at the same time, the Motion in the name of the Secretary of State for Scotland?

Mr. Anthony Greenwood: It is certainly convenient from our point of view on this side of the House, Mr. Speaker.

Mr. Renton: The Regulations under consideration have two purposes. I think the House will agree without hesitation that both those purposes are beneficial

from the point of view of the people holding rights to them. First, they provide for the commutation of police pensions, and, secondly, they extend the existing facilities for the allocation of sums from police pensions in favour of dependants. In achieving these purposes they give effect to unanimous recommendations of the Police Council for Great Britain, which contains representatives of the police authorities and of serving officers. If the House approves the Regulations, they will come into operation on 14th April. I do not want to take up time by referring to these complicated amending Regulations in great detail, but my hon. Friend the Joint Under-Secretary of State for Scotland or myself will be glad to answer any points of detail or of substance which hon. Members may have.
It might be helpful if I explained that the proposed arrangements for commutation will introduce an entirely new feature into the police pensions scheme, although it is a feature which appears in several other schemes in the public service. At present the retiring award for a police officer consists of a pension only, payable in the usual way periodically. The draft Regulations provide, however, that an officer who has completed thirty years' service or more shall have an option of surrendering up to one-sixth of his pension in return for a lump sum.
Perhaps I may mention in passing that it is hoped these facilities for police officers who are entitled to a maximum pension—the maximum being that to which an officer is entitled after thirty years' service—will offer some inducement to officers to continue serving after twenty-five years, which is the time when they first qualify for pension. The House will remember that this is a matter on which the Select Committee on Estimates had certain comments to make when considering it and publishing a Report not long ago.
Whilst thirty years' service will be the normal requirement, the new facilities will also be open to those officers who are obliged to retire on the ground either of age or of ill-health before they have been able to give thirty years' service. As I have mentioned, the second thing done by the draft Regulations is to extend the existing arrangements for the allocation of police pensions to dependants. The


present police pensions scheme includes provision both for widows' pensions and for children's allowances, but an officer who wishes to supplement these can allocate a part of his pension to provide an additional pension payable after his death to his widow or other dependant.
At present, however, under those arrangements an allocation can be made only at the time of the officer's retirement. The draft Regulations provide, however, that in future an officer will be able to give notice of his intention to allocate once he has completed twenty-five years' service and is in that way qualified for pension. The effect will be that an officer who wishes to continue serving after he has qualified for pension will be able to provide for a dependant during his final years of service after twenty-five years, as well as after his ultimate retirement. It is a fine point but I hope it is clear.
In conclusion, I should mention that these recommendations, made by the Police Council for Great Britain, were the outcome of lengthy discussions, at the end of which the Council reached unanimous agreement. In giving effect to the draft Regulations the House will be approving Regulations which improve the facilities provided by the police pensions scheme for officers and their dependants, and for that reason I commend them to the House.

7.37 p.m.

Mr. Anthony Greenwood: I welcome the Regulations which the Under-Secretary of State has presented to the House. As he has said, they were framed after lengthy discussion on the Police Council. All of us welcome the Regulations if they do something to improve police conditions and in that way help recruiting to the police and prevent the understaffing which still exists in many parts of the country.
I would like to get this point clear. As I understand, the new Regulations introduce the practice of commutation and also extend the practice of allocating a pension. At present, it is unsatisfactory that there is no provision for the payment of a lump sum and that it is purely a question of a yearly pension. It is much better that in future officers retiring with a maximum of pension, based on thirty years' service or more, should have the

option of surrendering one-sixth of that pension in return for a lump sum. It is good, too, that there should be special provision for men who retire on grounds of age or ill-health before the thirty years have expired.
At the same time, there are, of course, differences of opinion about commutation. I understand that some local authorities have had slight doubts about the introduction of this principle but, as the hon. and learned Gentleman said, the Regulations merely extend to the police a system which is already applied to many branches of the public service and also, I think it is true to say, is applied to the Armed Forces, to which he did not refer.
Therefore, the introduction of commutation is not a very revolutionary step. If I have any criticism of it, it is that it might have been better to make commutation possible in the case of retirements after twenty-five years' service, instead of insisting on the thirty years' service, except in the special cases to which the Regulations refer. That is something which would have been welcomed by the staff side of the Police Council.
Whatever reservations one has, there is no doubt that the scheme will prove useful. We ought to bear in mind that the police are in a special position. Many have to live in police houses and all of them have to live in the neighbourhood of their work. When the time comes for them to retire, many will wish to move from the district, and many will have to move from police houses. They are then faced with the problem of finding new accommodation. The fact that they can commute part of their pension to provide themselves with a lump sum to assist them in buying a house will be of great help to them.
There are difficulties and criticisms about commutation and it has not always been an unqualified success. One must hope that this will be a system which will be operated by the police with the wisdom for which they are renowned.
I have no reservations whatever about the Regulations dealing with allocation. Under the existing arrangements, a police officer can on his retirement surrender up to one-third of his pension to provide a pension payable after his death to his widow or some other dependant whom he


has nominated. As I understand, the new Regulations will allow an officer who continues to serve after he has qualified for pension to provide similar cover for a dependant during his final years of service.
I doubt whether that will be of very much use in the case of widows, because of the improved widows' pensions which have resulted from the increased contributions from 5 per cent. to 6¼ per cent. However, even though it will not be used a great deal in those cases, it will be extremely useful in other ways. For example, it will enable a police officer to make additional supplementary provision for his widow and to make special provision for somebody other than his widow, for instance, a disabled sister or some other relative. It will also enable officers who opted out of the improved widows' pension scheme of 1956 to make some provision for their widows. I therefore have no reservation about the provisions which deal with the allocation of pensions.
These proposals seem to me to be eminently fair and reasonable. So far as I can see, they involve no additional charge upon public funds. They go a long way towards improving the conditions under which the police work and providing them with greater security, and I hope that the House will give them a warm reception.

7.44 p.m.

Mr. James Callaghan: As the House well knows by this time, I have been consultant and adviser to the Police Federation for the last three years, and I have thoroughly enjoyed myself doing the job. I also hope that it has been of some profit to the Home Office, too, not perhaps in the way that the Home Office would think was right, because it may have cost it a little money.
These Regulations have been the subject of a great deal of discussion in the Police Council. It is wrong to use the word "negotiation," because pensions and matters concerned with pensions are not negotiable on the Police Council, but are subject to the final authority of this House. The position is that discussion takes place in the Police Council, but that the final decision is that of the Government of the day who bring the matter before the House for approval.
I want to make it clear, as my hon. Friend the Member for Rossendale (Mr. Anthony Greenwood) did, that the staff side of the Police Council, which had the benefit of these very detailed discussions with the official side, agrees with the Regulations, with the exception which my hon. Friend mentioned, namely, the question of the right to commute after twenty-five years instead of after thirty years.
Another matter which I wish to raise is why the date is as late as 14th April. It was at the annual conference of the Police Federation last November that the Home Secretary promised us these Regulations, which were then in a very advanced state, and I cannot believe that it has taken five months to draft five pages of Regulations. We have asked the Home Secretary about this and received one of those non-committal, Departmental, bureaucratic replies which say that it took so long to consult everybody concerned.
I am sorry to say so, but, to use the words which the Colonial Secretary used yesterday, that is simply not true. The consultations with the other bodies concerned could have been completed far more quickly, and there is no reason why the Regulations should have been delayed for all this time. I suspect that the Government wanted to delay the introduction of the Regulations until the new financial year, so that nothing came into the present financial year.
If it was not that, I cannot imagine what it could be, because every day that the introduction of these Regulations is delayed, someone else retires from the public service, which means that he cannot benefit from being able to commute or allocate. As my hon. Friend has said, it costs the Government nothing. This is something which the police service itself gives up in order to get something else back.
I am especially glad that my right hon. Friend the Member for South Shields (Mr. Ede) is present, because it ought to be said that it was the working party which he set up in 1951 whose Report led to the improvement in the widows' position and which has now led directly to these Regulations. I am sure that the hon. and learned Gentleman will not mind my saying that my right hon. Friend has a very high reputation among the rank and


file of the police service for the consistent help and encouragement which he gave, not merely by his attitude, but also because he devised the negotiating machinery through which a great deal of this work now takes place. I am very glad indeed that he is here tonight to see the consummation of the Report of the Committee which he launched some seven years ago.
This is a modest improvement in the conditions of the police service for which the police themselves will be paying. That ought to be made quite clear. As my hon. Friend has said, there is no charge on public funds. I found a strong suspicion among the rank and file of the police service originally about the introduction of this scheme. As my hon. Friend said, there was a feeling that commutation was a dangerous matter. I never shared that view, because of my experience in the Civil Service and because I had seen it operated in the Armed Forces.
I have always thought that to be able to commute a pension was very desirable. That is especially so in the police service where so many men live in tied cottages which they have to leave when they leave the Service. It helps if they can have a lump sum which they can use as the deposit for buying a house when they have to move and find themselves a new job. Therefore, it is clearly desirable for them to be able to commute their pension.
I am very glad that the Regulations contain provision for men who are injured on duty and who have to retire before they have completed twenty-five or thirty years' service. One of the most distressing features of the police service is that of young men, full of energy, vitality and vigour, who find their career over and themselves disfigured or crippled, or in some other way rendered physically handicapped through the action of some thug or bandit on our streets.
I have known one or two very distressing cases in the three years I have been associated with the police service. This is a feature of police life which I do not think ought to be overlooked. Any day, any member of the service who goes out on the streets may come face to face with an armed robber or with an irresponsible

boy armed with a flick-knife, and may find himself in physical danger which may result in severe incapacity. In my view, the pensions Regulations that exist do no more than recognise the especial hardships of a policeman's career.
At a time like this, when the police service itself is feeling a little under the weather because of recent events, I think it is desirable that the House of Commons should recognise the value of the services which these men are performing. I know from my own close contact with the police service that they have taken the recent publicity attached to the service very hardly indeed. Ninety-nine per cent. of the men in the police service are first-class men, and I have been proud to be associated with them.
They share with everybody else, and perhaps more keenly than anybody else, the desire that if there are any people in the police service who do not match up to the standards of integrity which we demand, they should be weeded out. There is no doubt that what has happened has had an effect on their morale, and they may feel that perhaps everybody is looking at them with suspicion. From my own contact with them, I say that they are men of the highest integrity and people to whom I would give my confidence on every possible occasion.
I am very glad indeed that these Regulations have been introduced. I think they will help the policeman in his difficult job, and I hope that the House will agree to them.

7.52 p.m.

Mr. Ede: I should like to thank my hon. Friend the Member for Cardiff, South-East (Mr. Callaghan) for his kindly reference to myself. May I say that I am glad to know that the recollection of the police forces of myself are as pleasant as my own recollections of my association with them?
I was once standing in a somewhat dishevelled condition in Reading market place, after I had reached Reading by water, when a burly police sergeant came up to me and said, "Sir, if you are who I think you are, I am very pleased to see you". Of course, there might be moments when such a greeting from a police officer would cause the most ominous feelings in one's mind, but I


hope it was a symptom of the mutual regard that the police forces and I have for one another.
These Regulations, we are told, have been passed by the Police Council for Great Britain, but, of course—

Mr. Renton: The phrase I used was "recommended by".

Mr. Ede: Well, recommended by the Police Council for Great Britain. That body, at the moment, is not known to the law, and that is why we have two Under-Secretaries here to deal with two separate sets of Regulations.
An agreement has been reached that there shall be a Police Council for Great Britain, but the law knows only of the Police Council for England and Wales and the Police Council for Scotland. After the Police Council for Great Britain has agreed to something, in order to get it before this House it has to be formally recommended by the two separate Police Councils. I had regarded the establishment of a Police Council for Great Britain as so great an achievement of unity for this great civilian force that, long before now, it would have been possible for legislative effect to have been given to that arrangement.
I do not want to say any more about it than this: I hope that the two Departments represented here today feel that if they can bring a small Measure before this House to make the Police Council for Great Britain a legal entity they need have no fear that there will be any trouble in getting it through the House. If matters are delayed, trouble sometimes arises which prevents them from being given the legal status which they ought to have.

Mr. Callaghan: As my right hon. Friend is raising this very important point, I should like to put to him the suggestion that if the answer he receives is that all the details have not yet been worked out, he can reply that it would be the simplest matter in the world to produce a general skeleton and not attempt to put in all the details, leaving them to be worked out and revised from time to time as the need becomes apparent.

Mr. Ede: I do not like dealing with skeletons. It is a grisly sort of business. I would like to see this body given legal

flesh and blood. I do not want to get half way and then have another halt before the consummation of what I regard as a very valuable decision by the police forces and authorities.
Following up the last words of my hon. Friend, which I fully endorse, I want to express my sympathy with the forces in the difficult time through which they have been passing, owing to the failure of a very, very small number to live up to the traditions of this great public service.
Can the Joint Under-Secretary put into figures of pounds, shillings and pence the effect which the new Regulations will have, for example, upon a constable with thirty years' service, so that the public can have some idea of the ultimate reward to such a man? I apologise for not having given the hon. and learned Member notice of this question. It is a subject in respect of which he would be quite entitled to say, "I ought to have had notice of this." If he cannot give an answer now, I will put a Question on the Order Paper, so that the details can be made known to the public.
When one talks about commuting one-sixth, we must remember that it all depends upon what the whole is. As a member of another profession which has enjoyed the right of a lump sum for a considerable number of years, I know the great advantage which accrues to people reaching retiring age, especially in these days, when they receive a lump sum. They can then either purchase a house, or pay a deposit upon its purchase, and can live there in the future. One of the difficulties of the administration of the police force is that all too often a man who has been living in a police house has no more chance of getting his own house to live in afterwards than has the man who is turned out of military service.
In my view, the Regulations constitute a great step forward. This possession of a lump sum, with which a man can start his post-service career in a position free from harrassment and worry, is one of the things which will tend to make the police service understand the esteem in which it is generally held by the community. I sincerely welcome these proposals, and I hope, at the same time, that it will not for much longer be necessary to have two sets of regulations to


deal with one subject, for it is surely a gross waste of ammunition to have to take two shots to kill one bird.

8.1 p.m.

Mr. Renton: If I may speak again with the leave of the House I think it might be as well, since I have discussed the matter with my hon. Friend the Joint Under-Secretary of State for Scotland.
First, I should like to join with the right hon. Gentleman the Member for South Shields (Mr. Ede) in the tribute that he has paid to the police. There are other occasions—perhaps not frequent enough—when tributes are paid to the police, and it is good to know that they are paid even on less important occasions such as this.
I should also like to join with the hon. Member for Cardiff, South-East (Mr. Callaghan) in the tribute that he has paid to his right hon. Friend the Member for South Shields. I gather that the right hon. Gentleman himself will be generous enough to agree with me that we must also acknowledge the work which his successors have done in continuing his own good work—of which these Regulations and previous Regulations are some evidence.
The right hon. Gentleman asked me something which set my mind going very fast on simple arithmetic, but I was saved by a note which tells me that the basic pay of a constable is £645. Therefore, if he retires after twenty-five years and receives 50 per cent. of his retiring pay as pension, he will receive a pension of £320 a year. That will frequently be at the age of about 45. This figure is relevant as a very broad guide, but not as an exact rule in all cases. If he stays for another five years, he will receive two-thirds, which will give him a pension of approximately £430 gross.
It is material to mention the point referred to by the hon. Member for Rossendale (Mr. Anthony Greenwood), concerning the total amount which can be covenanted by a police officer by way of commutation and allocation combined. If the hon. Gentleman will refer to the second page of the draft Regulations, he will find a new Regulation 6B. It is rather indirect in drafting, but its effect is to provide that not more than one-third of the pension may be covenanted in

these various ways. That is consistent with other schemes in the public service.
The hon. Member for Cardiff, South-East complained of the fact that the Regulations are not to come into operation until 14th April. There are good reasons for that, and I will put them before the House. First, I should like to mention two points arising out of the facts upon which the hon. Member's argument was based. The Regulations were not in an advanced state of preparation in November. The recommendation from the Police Council was dated 26th October.
Furthermore, although the staff side had no observations on the draft Regulations the police authorities and other authorities most certainly had comments to make upon them, and they had to be consulted. Although the Regulations cover only five pages they are a most complicated set of drafting Amendments.
If the hon. Member had had to do the amount of study which I have had to do before being prepared to speak to the House about them I think that he would agree that they form rather a jigsaw puzzle.

Mr. Callaghan: I have done so.

Mr. Renton: If that is so, I am astonished by his comment—because they are a very complicated set of drafting Amendments, and I do not think that it was too bad an effort that between 26th October and 11th March—with Christmas intervening—these Regulations were drafted, exchanged between the various authorities, re-amended, sent to the Government printers, and laid before both Houses. Bearing in mind the rather full parliamentary timetable it is not too bad an effort, that, having been laid on 11th March, they are to come into operation on 14th April.
I can assure the hon. Member that there was certainly no intention on the part of the Government to delay them until we reached the new financial year, or for any similar kind of purpose. If that had been the object I should have thought that we would have made them come into force on 1st April instead of 14th April.

Mr. Callaghan: One of our complaints is that they were promised for 1st April and were not introduced on that date. I have been very closely concerned with


these Regulations for the past twelve months, in which time possible amendments to them have been worked out. If the hon. and learned Member is telling me that Parliamentary draftsmen cannot produce such Regulations in less than four months, I wonder how they ever manage to draft Finance Bills.

Mr. Renton: In the first place, this is not a job for Parliamentary draftsmen; it is done by Departmental draftsmen.
As to the alleged promise, I am advised that when the question of the date of operation was being discussed a hope was expressed that it might be possible to make it 1st April, but a warning was given that that might be very difficult, as it turned out to be. At any rate, all concerned have done their best, and I do not think that very much hardship will have arisen through the very slight delay.
The hon. Member for Cardiff, South-East felt that the right to commute should arise, as the right of allocation has done in the past, after twenty-five years, instead of thirty years as provided in the Regulations. In considering this question my right hon. Friend the Home Secretary and the other police authorities represented on the Police Council felt bound to bear in mind the very heavy wastage of officers who leave the police force before they have completed thirty years' service. They felt it necessary to avoid taking any action which would increase the risk of more men retiring before they had completed thirty years' service.
I understand that the representatives of the serving officers did not suggest that a lump sum should become part of every retiring award, but they specifically asked that individual officers should have the option of surrendering part of their pension in return for a lump sum. Since the proposed facilities were to be optional, my right hon. Friend and the other police authorities considered it reasonable to take the opportunity of providing an inducement to officers to continue to serve after completing the minimum period of twenty-five years for pension, but I should stress that special provision has been made for officers who are required to retire on grounds of age or ill-health. They will be able to take advantage of the commutation provisions even before their thirty years have expired.
I am grateful to the right hon. Gentleman and his hon. Friends for raising

these points, which have helped me to clarify the position, and I hope that the Regulations will be unanimously and, indeed, enthusiastically approved.

Mr. Ede: The hon. and learned Gentleman did not answer my question about the possibility of making the Police Council for Great Britain a legal entity. May I ask him to check my mental arithmetic on the figures which he gave? I understand that a police constable retiring at the end of thirty years' service has a salary of £645—

Mr. Callaghan: No, £650.

Mr. Ede: That is an easy number to deal with. If I get to £650, I shall have to deal in amounts of 6s. 8d., and I am not a solicitor.

Mr. Callaghan: That may be so, but it happens to be the right sum.

Mr. Ede: All right, there is only a "fiver" in it.
Two-thirds of £645 is £430. I understand that the total of commutations must not exceed one-third of the pension. One-third of £430 is £143 6s. 8d.—one is bound to get to that 6s. 8d. eventually. I understand that a certain number of years' purchase of that £143 6s. 8d. can be paid in one form or another of commutation. What, approximately, is the lump sum that such an officer would get? It is a calculation based on the £143 6s. 8d.

Mr. Renton: The right hon. Gentleman's arithmetic has been right, except that there was one false hypothesis—I do not know whether that is the right arithmetical expression. The right hon. Gentleman assumed that under the Regulations it was possible for commutation alone to account for one-third of the total retirement pension. In fact, that is not possible; it is only one-sixth. The one-third refers to the total amount which may go in commutation and allocation combined. Therefore, the answer to the right hon. Gentleman's sum is obtained by dividing £430 by six, which I could easily do sitting down but which I am not going to start to do standing up.
There are two reasons why I have not dealt with the question of the Police Council. One is because, quite candidly, I am not prepared to do so in a discussion on these Regulations and the


other is, with respect, Mr. Deputy-Speaker, because I do not wish to incur your displeasure.

Mr. Callaghan: May I be allowed to say that the maximum pay of a police constable is not £645 or £650, but £660.

Mr. Renton: I was advised that the figure I quoted was the basic pay figure. It may be that there are other increments of which the hon. Gentleman is aware.

Question put and agreed to.

Resolved,
That the Draft Police Pensions (No. 2) Regulations, 1958, a copy of which was laid before this House on 11th March, be approved.

Police Pensions (Scotland) (No. 2) Regulations, 1958 [copy laid before the House, 12th March], approved.—[Mr. N. Macpherson.]

HADRIAN'S WALL

Motion made, and Question proposed, That this House do now adjourn.— [Mr. E. Wakefield.]

8.14 p.m.

Mr. Francis Noel-Baker: I am grateful for the opportunity to draw the attention of the House to the care of one of our most important monuments, and to go rather more fully into the matter than was possible some weeks ago at Question Time. I think it a satisfactory thing that, as we prepare ourselves for the Easter Recess and look back on a series of contentious and controversial debates, we should turn to a question which, though important, is certainly not political.
On the other hand, one can hardly say that the question of Hadrian's Wall is not a contentious matter. There have been times when disputes about it have assumed what one might call theological proportions. Very violent feelings have been aroused not only in recent weeks by articles in the Press and Questions in this House but on a number of occasions during the last thousand or nearly thousand years or so.
My purpose is not to take sides in the dispute in any way, but merely to provide an opportunity to ventilate different points of view and to give the Parliamentary Secretary a proper opportunity to

state his own position in the matter in some detail and to say precisely what his Ministry is doing. I understand that the Minister's direct responsibility for Hadrian's Wall is limited to a number of relatively short stretches of its length; that one of the more important, or at any rate the better-known sections, is in the care of the National Trust, while other parts of the wall are in private hands. I believe that it is the general intention of the Minister—and this is the first question I wish to ask the Parliamentary Secretary—to assume control as time goes by over an ever-increasing length, so that in the end all of it will be under his direct protection and care.
It is obvious that in a debate such as this I do not need to give a detailed description of the Wall which was built or initiated in A.D. 122 by the Emperor Hadrian, after a visit he paid to this part of the Roman Empire, and based on similar defensive works erected in Germany. The purpose was to keep the Scots out of this country—or at any rate the inhabitants of Scotland at that time—and for some hundreds of years, with disasters from time to time during its history, the Wall did succeed in doing that.
It is quite an elaborate defensive system. From what remains one can still see not only sections of the Wall in a relatively good state of preservation, but the elaborate sentinel system constructed at the same time; the mile-castles, small forts set at intervals of about 1,620 yards along its length with gateways to allow the passage of Roman soldiers into the protected areas north of the Wall, and then the two smaller towers between every mile-castle at intervals of about 450 yards. Behind the wall runs a Roman road, a military road, and behind that a vallum with earthworks designed to provide a protective military area in the immediate area of the Wall. Then in the neighbourhood of the Wall, but not part of it, are a series of Roman forts of which I believe there were originally about fifty but now only a handful remain.
The total length of the Wall was originally 80 Roman miles which is about 73 of our miles. Along most of its length it was built to a thickness of 10 ft. and a height of about 15 ft., so most experts think. All along its length it was faced with square facing stones set in mortar by the Roman legionaries. At some


points the core was made of rubble set in puddled clay, the work being dune by native labour gangs under the supervision of Roman soldiers. At other places slightly different building techniques were employed and there were modifications introduced while the Wall was being built, particularly to the central section, and to the way in which some of the forts were incorporated into it. All the works were completed during the ten years between A.D. 122 and 132. The Wall was not finally evacuated by Roman troops and their families until about A.D. 400.
The current controversy was initiated in the Press a few weeks ago by an article in the Observer which made a series of grave allegations against the Minister. Reading between the lines, one detects in this onslaught that some kind of interdepartmental warfare appears to have been raging between the Minister's Department and the National Trust. I hope it wil1 be possible for the Minister to mention that matter and to say that the apprehensions on that score are not correct. It would be very undesirable if, in dealing with a monument of this importance, or one in any other part of the country, the officials of the Ministry and the officials of the National Trust, who ought to be working hand in glove and with very cordial relations, were beginning to fight each other in public.
The first article appeared in the Observer on 9th February, written by the archæological correspondent of that newspaper, Jacquetta Hawkes. She started by referring to the turbulent history of the Wall and then gave a surprising analogy. She said that the rôle of what she called the "barbarians"—with whom she identified herself—might now be said to be taken by local archæologists, representatives of the National Trust and other independent critics. The rôle of what she called the "Imperial authority" was represented by the Ancient Monuments Department of the Ministry of Works. She made a passing reference to the inter-Departmental conflict which is apparently taking place.
She said that the original dispute between the Ministry and the National Trust might well now be settled, but that greater issues still remained. She accuses the Ministry of trying to take "the spirit of Subtopia" into the area of the Wall

and she refers to "little lawns, cement, railings and notice boards". Somewhere else, reference was made to "Mappin Terraces".
She gets down to her most serious allegation when she says:
It is reliably reported that on the section near Birdoswald four workmen are employed with only occasional supervision. They dismantle the Wall, nine feet at a time, stacking the square masonry and rubble filling and consolidating the foundations.
She goes on to say:
The Roman mortar, which varied in colour from one age to the next and therefore shows repairs and alterations."—
which is a matter of importance to archæologists—
is destroyed without record. Far worse, the work emerging from the hands of these excellent workmen is not Hadrian's Wall at all. It is a copy—and one which has lost all the gifts of time.
Can the Parliamentary Secretary tell us about the section of the Wall which is illustrated by photographs which appeared with that article? I am given to understand that, in point of fact, that section is not in the state in which it was left by the Romans when they evacuated, but is largely a nineteenth-century reconstruction built by Mr. Clayton, who used the original stones but built them into what was virtually a new wall.
There have been arguments about this Wall, and about many other ancient monuments, concerning the extent to which they should be reconstructed. The argument about Hadrian's Wall has also been applied to some of our great religious monuments, as is the case with Stonehenge, and with the Acropolis at Athens. Somebody wrote in a newspaper—I have not been able to trace it—that it would be a very good thing for the Ministry to pull down part of the Wall and reconstruct it so that people could see how it originally looked. That is not a view to which any of us would now subscribe. I should be grateful if the Parliamentary Secretary would tell us a little about reconstructions of Hadrian's Wall in the past.
When this first article was referred to at Question Time in the House by the hon. Lady the Member for Tynemouth (Dame Irene Ward), by myself, and by my hon. Friend the Member for St. Pancras, North (Mr. K. Robinson), the


Minister of Works gave a very strong reply. He referred to the article in the Observer and agreed that it was "absolutely inaccurate". In reply to a supplementary question by the hon. Lady whether the Minister regarded the article as "absolutely inaccurate and unfounded", the Minister said:
My hon. Friend is entirely correct in her assumption.
When he was further questioned by my hon. Friend the Member for St. Pancras, North, he said that of course there were two opinions on subjects like this—
the correct and the incorrect. What is being done by my archæological department … is the correct line, while the line that takes the contrary view is the incorrect one."—[OFFICIAL REPORT, 25th February, 1958; Vol. 583, c. 179 and 180.]
The Minister did not leave very much room for doubt about his position in the matter.
Nevertheless, a great deal of doubt has persisted in the public mind. Only last Sunday the original article was followed up by a second one from the same writer in the Observer, illustrated by three rather terrifying photographs. In that article Mrs. Hawkes said:
The Minister stated that Roman masonry is never dismantled and rebuilt unless the stones are on the point of falling. Local observers saw the East Gate of the Birdoswald Port taken down, although the walls were in good condition.
She produced three photographs, which appeared to show unsupervised workmen pick-axing down the upper levels of the Wall in an excessively vigorous fashion and a drastic rearrangement of the facing stones. It would be very good if the Parliamentary Secretary could make some observations about these serious allegations.
They have been followed up by other people in the area who are quite clearly disturbed by what has been happening lately. I should like to quote from four reports from people on the spot. The reports happened to reach me as the result of the Questions in the House of Commons. One correspondent says that an archæologist whom he knows
… saw the facing stones removed and put into two piles, the core rubble into a third, until the whole Wall was down to three base courses (out of, I think, round about 10).
He adds:
Local antiquaries who are in position to keep an eye on what is going on are indigant.

Another correspondent refers to Hard-knot Castle in Eskdale, Cumberland, which he visited in July, 1957. He says:
This Roman fort is also in process of reconstruction by the Ministry of Works and the result, to my mind, was most unfortunate. The stones of the walls have been refaced, in many places right down to the foundations, which, presumably must have necessitated the dismantling of the structure down to ground level. The newly built wall is capped by a layer of modern cement to protect the rubble filling from weathering. Masses of fallen stone and rubble from the original construction lie outside the fort. I do not know how often a representative of the Ministry of Works visited Hardknot, but the actual work was being done by local workmen.
Perhaps the Parliamentary Secretary could find it convenient to refer to this fort, because it has been the subject of another letter from a local correspondent who states:
At Hardknot fort in Eskdale they are still pulling it down higgledy-piggledy".
Finally, I would refer to another local correspondent who, after describing what he had seen in the area of Hadrian's Wall, wrote:
I do not believe that the Minister's advisers are aware of the extent of this rebuilding and I hope it may be possible to take further action to bring the matter to light.
The House would like a reassurance that the Minister and his advisers are very closely aware of the detailed work which is taking place on the spot, and perhaps he can tell us something about the supervision, not only locally but from his Department and from his archaeological advisers.
It is many years since I visited the Wall.

Mr. Eric Fletcher: Shame.

Mr. Noel-Baker: It is an omission which I intend to repair at the earliest possible opportunity during a Parliamentary Recess. It might be very much to the convenience of the House if one of these days the Parliamentary Secretary and his right hon. Friend arranged for a party of hon. Members to go there to see what is happening, perhaps taking a party of journalists, too. I am sure that we should have a very pleasant and interesting time. I think the controversy has perhaps raged sufficiently to justify him in putting all his cards on the table on the spot.
It is some time since I visited Hadrian's Wall but I have a very vivid impression indeed of the impact which it made on me at that time, not only because of its immense historical and archaeological importance, which, when I went there, I was not in a position to appreciate as fully as I do now, but also because of the great beauty of the site. I was looking today through some literature on the subject and I came across a description written some years ago which remains in my mind. It reads:
As you look east and west and trace the long line of wall winding for miles from end to end of perilous ledges and climbing from hill to hill, as you turn south to the Tyne, and the dark fells beyond it or north to long flat wastes and pathless mosses, the vision of a great Empire rises. Here, on the uttermost limit of the Roman world, the desolate land has been stamped for ever with the sign of its former lords. On these high moors we can realise, almost more clearly than in the Forum of Rome, the secret of that defence by which Rome guarded the fabric of civilisation through the long menace of darkness and dissolution.
These are dramatic words describing the importance of what is a very precious ancient monument. I hope that after we have had a rather fuller discussion than I originally expected, the Parliamentary Secretary will give us a reassuring reply about the Wall.
I do not think I shall be out of order, Mr. Speaker, if I ask your indulgence to raise one other matter which the Minister and the Parliamentary Secretary knew that I should raise briefly this evening. That is to ask whether the Parliamentary Secretary would find it convenient during his reply to say briefly what progress is being made with another very important ancient monument, Stonehenge. In mentioning Stonehenge and in view of the fact that we have a little extra time, I should like him to say one or two words about what I regard as an even more important ancient monument—perhaps because it is a little nearer my constituency—the great stone circle at Avebury.
I am grateful for having had this opportunity to raise these matters. I hope that other hon. Members will take part in the debate and I look forward with keen anticipation to the Parliamentary Secretary's reply.

8.33 p.m.

Dame Irene Ward: I am very glad indeed that we are having the opportunity to discuss in some detail this very important matter of the preservation of Hadrian's Wall. It is rightly a matter which interests a very wide section of the public, and it is of the utmost importance that it should be thoroughly thrashed out so that we may know the truth of this controversy which has arisen.
I had the privilege and good fortune to represent Wallsend-on-Tyne for fourteen years in the House. I live in those parts and almost from childhood, to girlhood and to middle-age—I will not go any further than that—I have walked the Wall. I know almost every bit of it and every part of its history. I have taken very many people from that part of England which those in the South like to call the "civilised South" to see the the Roman Wall. I myself have a very deep affection for and interest in it and in its future. From time to time our local antiquarian society visits the Wall. Visitors from all over the world join our local society. In the north of England we take great pride in our heritage and anything which affected it adversely would perhaps cause the hordes of the North to descend on the Ministry with a view to seeing that the Ministry knew and loved the Wall as much as we do in the North. I was very disturbed when I read Miss Jacquetta Hawkes' article in the Observer—

Mr. E. Fletcher: Mrs. Jacquetta Hawkes.

Dame Irene Ward: Miss Jacquetta Hawkes, now Mrs. Priestley.
I also read the subsequent article last Sunday and examined the photographs. I am sure we would all welcome a full statement by my hon. Friend the Parliamentary Secretary. Of course, I have no quarrel with the way in which the hon. Member for Swindon (Mr. F. Noel-Baker) put his case, but I am a little surprised that in recounting the Press correspondence referring in some detail to Jacquetta Hawkes's articles, he did not also mention the letter that was published in the Observer a fortnight after the original article, signed by two very well-known figures in the archaeological world in the north of England, Mr. Birley and Mr. Gillam. Mr. Birley for many years


had one of the houses very close to the Roman Wall, and the opinion of people who live in the north of England and their appreciation of the situation carry a great deal of weight in matters of this kind, when there is a real conflict of opinion.
The hon. Gentleman said that he wished to be non-controversial. This is, indeed, a non-controversial matter, but it is a pity that he did not for the purposes of the record reiterate the letter that was published by these two very distinguished, highly respected and well-known archaeologists in the north of England. If he had done so we might have had the whole story.
I myself do not know Jacquetta Hawkes, but I noticed that in answer to my Parliamentary Question it was stated that she had not been to the Wall before she wrote her original article. She has been there since, and I am sure that if the hon. Gentleman is going there he will get a great welcome from the North when he arrives. When a case of this kind is presented it is only fair to quote the opinions of those who, as I say, are respected in the north of England. We who live in the north of England know what they think. We are aware of their standing, and when allegations are made in the House which are bound to have a wide audience deeply interested in the Wall, it is only fair that those who cherish, watch and guard the Wall should also have their opinions quoted.
I had no idea that we should be having such a long debate; otherwise I would have obtained the letter written by Professor Birley and Mr. Gillam, for the sake of the record. As there is still some time available, I hope that the Parliamentary Secretary will himself put it on the record so that we can have the whole story.

Mr. F. Noel-Baker: If I may interrupt, may I say, first, that I stand reproved by the hon. Lady, but I am grateful that she has raised this matter herself. I think it may be possible for one of my hon. Friends to quote the substance of that letter before the debate is terminated.

Mr. Anthony Greenwood: If it would help the hon. Lady, I can state that Professor Birley and Mr. Gillam first of all paid tribute to the skill

of the workmen engaged on this work, and then said:
The Minister's replies are in complete accordance with our personal observation over a long period of years.

Dame Irene Ward: I am grateful that we now have that on the record, because it is important. I am very glad that the hon. Gentleman made those observations.
I wish to raise one more point. I am not an expert; I only have this deep and abiding affection for the Wall. When I saw in last Sunday's Observer the photographs which appeared to show a displacement of the stones, I wondered whether I had been foxed by the Minister. So I was very glad to see that the hon. Member for Swindon proposed to raise this subject on the Adjournment. Not that I was completely foxed, for I am very independent-minded and like to be sure. Therefore, I am very glad that the hon. Gentleman has raised the matter tonight and that we have a reasonable length of time in which to debate it, and I hope that the Parliamentary Secretary will put beyond all shadow of doubt the proper position and view of those who are qualified to judge.
I want to know what the condition of the Wall is at the present time. If we look back into the history of the Wall we find, what the hon. Gentleman the Member for Swindon did not mention, that in days when the population was not so interested in our historical heritage many people took stones from the Wall for other building. Many farmhouses and small manor houses in the district are built of stone which was taken from the Roman Wall, and people in the North Country, for improving, as they thought, their churches, also paid visits to the Roman Wall. There is a tremendous controversy whether we should try to maintain what we ourselves now see and love, or whether it would be better not to tamper with the remains.
I am not in a position to judge, but I am always guided by the experts, and I know both Mr. Birley and Mr. Gillam. Therefore, when the Minister answered my Question and my supplementary question I felt satisfied. However, I am bound to say, once again, that I wondered when I read Jacquetta Hawkes' article last Sunday. Therefore, I hope that when my hon. Friend replies to the debate tonight we shall have the truth,


the whole truth and nothing but the truth, because that is all that will satisfy us in the North.

8.42 p.m.

Mr. Edward Short: May I say how much I welcome this debate and how grateful I am to my hon. Friend the Member for Swindon (Mr. F. Noel-Baker) for raising this subject, because my constituency is one of the constituencies which lie astride the Wall, or the site where the Wall stood. Not one small part of it remains in my constituency, which is entirely built up, but, originally, the Wall ran right through the middle of it.
I welcome the debate not only because it calls attention to the present method of restoring file Wall, though I am not, I think, quite so worried as my hon. Friend is about that, though I have some doubts about the matter, but also because it calls attention to the existence of the Wall. I shall explain in a minute why I think that is tremendously important.
This great Wall which runs from the Tyne at Wallsend right across the country to Solway has stood there not a thousand years, as my hon. Friend said—he got his arithmetic a bit wrong—but for 1,800 years.

Mr. F. Noel-Baker: I meant nearly 2,000 years.

Mr. Short: Yes, nearly 2,000 years indeed, not 1,000 years. Many miles of it, many mile-castles, many encampments have been preserved. It would not keep the Scots out today—which, on the whole, is perhaps a bad thing—but, as the hon. Lady the Member for Tynemouth (Dame Irene Ward) said, those of us who know and love the Wall so well know that it runs over what I believe to be some of the most glorious country in this island, across great, wild, impressive moors in Northumberland and Cumberland, up hill and down dale like the Great Wall of China. It is something which everybody in this country, I believe, ought to see.
There is a great fort called Housesteads, just off the main Newcastle to Carlisle road, at one of the highest points of the Wall. It stands there looking both east and west and thence one can see the Wall stretching for miles up hills and fells, on crags and down again. It

is a most impressive and wonderful sight. I believe that after Stonehenge it is probably the most impressive ancient monument that we have in the country.
Apart from the Wall, there are the great camps at Housesteads and Chesters, both of which have been unearthed and preserved. We also have a temple of Mithras. The temple in the City of London was not the first one discovered in this country. We have a very well-preserved one just off the Wall, and it is now uncovered and preserved and accessible to the public.
In the Roman encampment at House-steads one can see the marks made on the roads by the Roman chariot wheels as the Romans entered the four gateways of the camp. One can see the places where the soldiers sharpened their swords. One can see the initials of the soldiers carved on the barrack-room walls. There one feels that one is really in the midst of something which is alive, that the Wall is a living symbol of that old civilisation.
These things should be much more widely known, not only to tourists but to the British people as well. That is one of the reasons why I welcome the debate. So should, for that matter—if I may here digress for a moment—the counties through which the Wall runs. I believe that the counties of Northumberland, Cumberland and Westmorland together represent probably the loveliest part of this country. It is exquisite beauty, and it is also accessible beauty. Any hon. Members who have stood at Housesteads or at Friar's Crag, or at Derwentwater and looked up towards Borrowdale, or have stood at the top of Hartside Pass from Alston and looked down the Eden Valley, will agree that these three counties are indeed a lovely part of Britain. Hadrian's Wall is only one of the many attractions of this part of the country.
I want to say a word about the method of restoring. The method used by the Ministry does not look too bad where the Wall is fairly high, because the lower courses, I believe, are not disturbed. The top loose stones are embedded in concrete, and they are fairly high up and cannot be seen very easily. As the hon. Lady said, most of the villages in the Tyne Valley are obviously built of stones taken from the Roman Wall. The


method which is employed looks rather frightful in the very low parts of the Wall where only the lower courses or footings remain. In effect, these parts of the Wall are being rebuilt. These small bits of the Wall—there is one at Heddon-on-the-Wall and one at Chollerford—look just like heaps of stones bedded in cement. That looks frightful. However, the method seems to work all right in the higher parts of the Wall where there are seven, eight or nine courses of stones left.
I appeal to the Minister to spend rather more, if it is possible to do so, on the work of uncovering Roman remains in the north of England. There is one very great camp on the top of Bowes Moor just on the borders of the North Riding and Westmorland. It is obvious from the marks on the ground that it is a very big camp. I believe that if it could be uncovered it would probably prove to be one of the most impressive Roman monuments in this country.
I wish also to refer to the work of the late Mr. F. Simpson, of Newcastle-upon-Tyne. The hon. Lady and other hon. Members who know the Wall will know of his work. In his youth he began to take an interest in the Wall. He gave up his career as an engineer and devoted the whole of his life, and, I believe, the whole of his fortune, to the work of preserving the Wall, purchasing parts of it and making them accessible to the public. He was honoured by the late King and also by Durham University, but I think that there ought to be some monument to him somewhere along the Wall. I would ask the Minister to bear that in mind. Mr. Simpson was a man inspired. Those of us who knew him knew that he was really fired by the civilising influence of Rome and the need for such an influence today.
Those hon. Members who have read the life of the right hon. Member for Woodford (Sir W. Churchill) will remember the effect that his first reading of Gibbon's "Decline and Fall" had on him. It was from that moment that the real development of his mind and of his powers of expression began. Looking at the right hon. Gentleman's great wartime speeches we can see the influence of Gibbon in almost every sentence that he uttered. I think that that is the true significance of the Wall. It is not just a

decaying monument of a long-dead civilisation, but a living symbol and a present-day contact with a civilisation that runs through many of the basic concepts of our own.
Those who come under the spell of the Wall, as the hon. Lady the Member for Tynemouth has, and as those of us who know it well have, feel the same sense of exhilaration that the right hon. Member for Woodford felt when he first read Gibbon so many years ago. That is its importance, and that is why this little debate is far more important than it would appear to be.
Let us preserve the Wall with care, but, more important than that, let us see that the people of this country and of other countries, and especially young people, visit it, take an interest in it, and see and feel what it symbolises, for I believe that Hadrian's Wall, and the great monuments along it, will bring people into contact with a civilising influence that the world today needs more than anything else.

8.52 p.m.

Mr. Eric Fletcher: I hope that it will not be thought to be an intrusion for a Londoner, representing a mere London constituency, to intervene in the debate for just a few minutes. I do so partly because we have abundant time and partly because I take an interest in these matters. I only wish that I could speak with the same eloquence and feeling of reverence for our northern monuments as did my hon. Friend the Member for Newcastle-upon-Tyne, Central (Mr. Short).
Like him, I wish that Hadrian's Wall were better known. I suppose that it is inevitable that it makes a much greater appeal to my hon. Friend, and to the hon. Lady the Member for Tynemouth (Dame Irene Ward) than it does to us Southerners, but I can well appreciate the sensitive feeling that they have for this great, perhaps the greatest, permanent relic of Roman civilisation in Britain.
My hon. Friend the Member for Swindon (Mr. F. Noel-Baker) is fortunate in representing a part of England, on Salisbury Plain, that is very rich in prehistoric monuments, but there is nothing like Hadrian's Wall, in the North, that can so remind us of the prowess of Roman civilisation which flourished in these


islands for at least four centuries, and which, I believe, left an abiding mark on future generations—

Mr. F. Noel-Baker: Perhaps my hon. Friend will allow me to intervene, as I feel that I must correct him on two things. First, Swindon is not on Salisbury Plain. I think that my constituents would complain if I did not put him right. Secondly, if he would like to come with me to the Swindon area I can show him some of the finest Roman roads in the country, and a number of other very impressive ancient monuments.

Mr. Fletcher: I was hoping that my hon. Friend would be flattered by the suggestion that Swindon was in the vicinity of Salisbury Plain. However, it is in the vicinity of Avebury and Stonehenge, to which he referred, so it is in the vicinity of two of the greatest prehistoric monuments in this country and, perhaps, in Western Europe. I should be glad to accept the invitation he has kindly offered, though I assure him that I have some familiarity with Roman roads, particularly the Fosse Way in the neighbourhood of his constituency, to which he also referred.
After that digression, perhaps we may return to what Mrs. Jacquetta Hawkes said in her most recent Observer article, "Back to the Wall". Unlike the hon. Lady the Member for Tynemouth, I have the honour of knowing Mrs. Jacquetta Hawkes, and I have the greatest admiration for her scholarship, her criticism, her knowledge and her views on any archaeological subject.
I do not think that it is a bad thing that, by a happy accident, we should have the opportunity this evening of ventilating the subject to which her articles have drawn attention and, indeed, as my hon. Friend the Member for Swindon suggested, of discussing other aspects of the work of the Ancient Monuments Division of the Ministry of Works. The subject is by no means unimportant. Is it of great interest to both students and the general public of this country, and it has an increasing interest for overseas visitors. Every day, it is being more clearly realised that everything which helps to illuminate the past helps us to understand better the present and the problems of the future.
It may, perhaps, seem a trivial matter whether or not the Minister is acting in

accordance with the best archaeological principles in the particular methods he is adopting in the preservation of Hadrian's Wall. I am certainly not in a position to judge. If there was one sentence which the Minister uttered on 25th February with which we all agreed, it was that
There are often two opinions on every, object."—[OFFICIAL REPORT, 25th February, 1958; Vol. 583, c. 180.]
and this is particularly so in archaeological matters.
I do not think that it is for the House to judge between, on the one hand, the criticisms of Mrs. Jacquetta Hawkes and, on the other, the opinions of Professor Birley, Professor Richmond and others in the North, for whose opinions I also have the greatest respect. What is of wider significance is that we should appreciate the problem which often confronts the Ministry of Works not only in relation to Hadrian's Wall, but in other matters of preservation.
There is the problem of whether or not the Department should preserve a monument in the precise form in which it is found, with all the accumulation of debris, and so forth, which has grown up around it since it was built, or whether there should be not a radical reconstruction, but a renovation in such a way as to make the monument more easily intelligible to, and appreciated by, this generation.
I can understand the conflict that has arisen in the past on a number of important sites between the Ancient Monuments Board and other archaeologists represented in the Society of Antiquaries of which the hon. Member for Bournemouth, East and Christchurch (Mr. N. Nicolson) is a distinguished Fellow. It is right that in this House we should take the opportunity of paying a tribute to the work that the Ancient Monuments Board has done in recent years in connection with the preservation of our ancient monuments and in laying them out in a manner which makes them not only places of beauty, but places in which people can take an intelligent interest to enable them to appreciate the work that is done.
May I, in passing, refer to places which I have seen in the last few years—for example, Richborough, Pevensey, the ancient Anderida. To come to mediaeval


times, I can think of Goodrich Castle, Castle Acre and many others. I am impressed by the way in which these monuments of antiquity and great national interest are preserved by the hon. Gentleman's Department. It may well be that in the course of preservation something is done which necessarily or inevitably disturbs the original nature of the ancient fabric and the way in which the stones were placed. But I noticed—and I must say this in justification of the Minister—that Mrs. Jacquetta Hawkes points out in her article in the Observer of 30th March:
It would be unfair to say that historical evidence is being lost in this way, but indisputably it could be.
There is a very slight risk of that, but I think that what is more important is that in dealing with a monument like this Wall, unlike, for instance, the Temple of Mithras, we are dealing with a long section of the countryside of northern England, and the significance of the Wall is in its siting from place to place, in its general appearance and in its relation to the milestones.
To the examples given by the hon. Member for Newcastle-upon-Tyne, Central, may I add my appreciation of the way Corstopitum has been preserved. I am bound to say that in dealing with a long stretch of Hadrian's Wall, it is obviously impossible to deal with the whole of the face, but it is appropriate that a certain section of the face of the Wall should be dealt with in the way in which the Minister's Department is dealing with it, in spite of the criticism of Mrs. Hawkes that some stones have been displaced.
It is one of the curiosities of this subject, as Mrs. Hawkes herself recognises from her photographs, that owing to the peculiar lichen-marked stone, of which she gives two photographs, one can see how the lichen-marked stone which was formerly in the lower course is now in a slightly raised course. Therefore, if it was necessary to make that adjustment in the position of the stones, one has not only preserved for posterity the evidence of how the Wall was originally built, but one has preserved also the evidence of how this generation has thought it desirable to reconstruct it. There is, therefore, no possibility of future generations being deceived. That is not unimportant.
I would have thought that the same principle should apply to a work of this kind as is applied in the case of Stonehenge, to which my hon. Friend has referred, where we are reconstructing the trilithon. I am sure that that is a right decision to have taken. The mere fact that it is being done, and that there is current literary and pictorial evidence of how it is being done removes any possibility of future generations being misled about the subject.
One of the difficulties of archaeology in the past when excavating prehistoric, Roman or Anglo-Saxon sites has been that there is no literary evidence to indicate what changes have been made in successive generations. Today, however, we are living in an age of archaeological work and restoration, when everything that is done is photographed and recorded, so that future generations may be able to detect any changes that have been made from the original status of any monument.
I fear that I have spoken for too long, but I wanted to pay this tribute to the work of the Department and to say that we are all anxious to hear what the Minister has to tell us.

9.3 p.m.

Mr. Nigel Nicolson: I am glad that the hon. Member for Islington, East (Mr. E. Fletcher) began his speech by paying tribute to Mrs. Hawkes. Lest anybody imagines that she is an archaeological busybody or an amateur, it was good to have a reminder from the hon. Member that she is one of the most distinguished archxologists of her day.
In addition—the combination is not always automatic—Mrs. Hawkes is also one of the greatest writers of the day. She is a person who not only has profound scholarship in her subject, but is able to marry up scientific fact with a sense of landscape and culture, which is almost unequalled in any archæological writer of today. I also know her personally, and although I have disagreed with her strongly over some of the criticisms she has made of the Ministry's treatment of Hadrian's Wall, I am happy to think that I retain her valuable friendship.
Mrs. Hawkes was by no means the first person who raised the question of the


treatment of Hadrian's Wall in the postwar years. In fact, many years before she wrote her article which has led to this controversy coming out in public, the matter was already under consideration by the Ancient Monuments Board for England, of which I have the honour to be the only lay member. The other members of the Board, whose duties are to advise my right hon. Friend upon the treatment of the ancient monuments in England, are all archæologists of the first rank. I do not know why I am there at all; all I can say is that it is the happiest job which Parliament has ever brought me.
The others range from Sir Mortimer Wheeler, who is now generally regarded as the doyen of archæologists, to Professor Richmond, than whom there is no greater authority upon the relics of the Roman occupation of Britain, who was the director of the British School at Rome and who has only recently left his appointment at Newcastle as Professor of Roman Archæology. There are six or seven others, including Professor Grimes, who is the discoverer and excavator of the now famous Mithraie Temple at Wallbrook, all of whom are not only thoroughly versed in archwological matters, but are also well aware of their wider responsibilities to keep the monuments under my right hon. Friend's care in a condition which is not only truthful in the archæological sense, but will also make an appeal to the general public for whose benefit and education they are preserved.
When the Ancient Monuments Board came to consider this matter of Hadrian's Wall, it went into it with the greatest care. It consulted not only with those archaeologists outside the Board who know most about the subject, but also consulted with the National Trust, which owns a section about three and a half miles long in the open moorlands, and with private owners who own here and there smaller sections of the Wall and on whose land it lies.
In each of these cases the Board came to the conclusion that there was no single treatment of the Wall which was suitable for every part of it, because the Wall, running straight across our country, passes through an enormous variety of countryside. It starts in the industrial suburbs of Newcastle, runs through agricultural country until it reaches the point,

about 20 or 30 miles from its start, where it leaves the fields and climbs up to the highest point of the fells. This is perhaps the most famous part of the Wall, for it is also not only the most beautiful country but the part where the Wall itself is best preserved. Coming over the fells it then runs through more agricultural country towards Carlisle, and, finally, out into the marshes round the Solway Firth.
When the Board came to consider how the Wall could be dealt with, it noted that a large part of it is a reconstruction dating from the nineteenth century. The hon. Member for Swindon (Mr. F. Noel-Baker) mentioned that it was a Mr. Clayton from Chesters who undertook a great deal of this valuable work, but the part of the Wall which the public quite naturally and rightly admire most, running westwards from Housesteads is more or less a fake.
It is a fake in the sense that although the original stones were re-used they were pulled apart and replaced in an order which did not necessarily correspond to the order in which they were originally found. The top was flattened, and a matting of turf, along which the public could walk, as they do in summertime, was placed along the top of the Wall. Some of them may imagine that they are treading where the Roman sentries originally trod, but very few of them know that they are walking upon a platform which was erected less a hundred years ago.
The question arose, when new parts of the Wall were uncovered, should the Ministry treat them in exactly the same way as Mr. Clayton did, and which the National Trust followed, or should it evolve a method which would be archeologically less indefensible? There can be no question that to pull the stones apart, to flatten the top and to lay on it an artificial turf walk is archeologically incorrect. It is practising a deceit upon the public, and it is certainly not preserving for future generations the original work as it was found.
The Ministry decided, and in this it had the complete backing of the Ancient Monuments Board for England, to preserve as much as possible of what it found, and to consolidate, render it waterproof, and, as far as possible, render it proof against the ravages of weather, sheep and trippers. To do that, it has had to deal quite boldly with those


parts of the Wall which it found in imminent danger of collapse. What would be the use of rendering waterproof an old piece of masonry which would have tumbled part in a few years' time. It is precisely those sections which, in some cases, have had to be dismantled down to foundation level so that they could be carefully rebuilt in a form which would make them immune to the ravages of time.
Wherever the officials of the Ministry found the Wall in a state which was not crumbled and where the original Roman mortar was in a sound condition, they did not touch the original stones, either the square stones of the two faces, or the unshaped stones of the central core. They merely rendered it waterproof by putting a covering of modern mortar chosen particularly to tone in with the original Roman work, and cleared away all the roots, grass and earth, which, up to that time, had concealed the Wall from view.
That is a summary of the method used, and I will leave it to the Parliamentary Secretary to describe what is shown in the photographs which were published in one of Mrs. Hawkes's articles. I am sure that he will be able to give to the House and the country an explanation of these photographs which will remove any doubt that the workmen and supervisors employed by the Ministry of Works have been guilty of archæological sacrilege.
If one has to choose between the National Trust method of preservation and the Ministry of Works method, the Ministry's method is certainly the sounder from the purely archeological point of view. The National Trust has quite deliberately imitated the method first adopted by Mr. Clayton and has found it necessary, in order to provide a level surface upon which to lay a turf walk, to knock off bits of the central core and remove the face stones from one part of the section to another to render it a single uniform rectilinear whole.
The National Trust has produced something, I quite agree, which looks much more like a wall than the Ministry of Works wall, and it is more pleasing in appearance, but it has, in a sense, been guilty of faking in the same way as Mr. Clayton, less than a hundred years ago. It has this further disadvantage. Very naturally, when you find provided for

you a turf walk, you walk along it, and hon. Members can imagine the physical effect of hundreds, and perhaps even hundreds of thousands, of people tramping annually along the top of a wall which is only 10 ft. wide. They gradually force apart both faces from the centre outwards, so that in the course of years they will tumble to the ground, and we shall have to start all over again.
As a further consequence, I am led to believe, the turf contains certain acids which gradually eat their way into the core, and so will destroy it by a chemical process that may extend over many years. Besides that, and most important of all, the turf walk gives the public a completely false impression of what the Roman wall was like. It suggests that it was a little less than 5 or 6 ft. high, when its true height was really 20 ft., surmounted by a parapet.
Many people, when they come back from Northumberland. are unimpressed by the Roman Wall, because they think that what they saw was, in fact, what the Romans built. There is a famous letter which is preserved among the records of one of the Northumbrian archeological societies from a master of foxhounds who wrote to protest that the farmers in that part of the country were building walls of such fantastic dimensions that it was almost impossible to hunt. They had, in fact, succeeded in hunting and in jumping across Hadrian's Wall.
May I end by making a few suggestions to the Ministry? I would encourage my hon. Friend the Parliamentary Secretary to make even profounder researches than he has hitherto done into a new sort of mortar to consolidate the remains. It is true that the mortar now used is of a special type which tones in quite well with the original Roman work, but many people, especially when the work has just been completed, find that it looks nearly new, though in the course of time it will fade. I only wish that in the interval a mortar could be found which will not look quite so garish in its early years.
Secondly, and perhaps more controversial, I think it would be right, particularly in the central section of the Wall, to allow the grass to grow again naturally upon the original work. It might be said that this will start up the trouble all over


again, and that the grass roots will gradually penetrate and loosen the mortar, so that the Wall will collapse after a few years. I do not think that that is necessarily so. Going round the country, one can see many houses which have grass growing from their roofs without any damage to them at all, and on Hadrian's Wall the same would apply and it would be a perfectly natural clothing to the repair-work of the Ministry of Works, and one which would go some way towards meeting the criticisms of Mrs. Hawkes about the Mappin Terraces.
Thirdly, I wish he would remove the railings from all sections of the Wall under his care. Mrs. Hawkes was not quite accurate in saying that in the central and finest section there are little lawns and railings. There is none in this section, but there are others in Chester's Camp and places just outside Birdoswald and again in the Brunton section.
In these places there are ugly and quite unnecessary railings. When, in the past, I have said that they were unnecessary, the reply has been that they are a protection against traffic or cattle. I cannot believe that a solid wall, ten feet thick, requires the protection of a little, finicky railing against either of those adversaries. It would be infinitely more effective if the Wall were left alone in its field, without any Ministry hedging around it.
Fourthly, I hope that the Minister will take urgent action, as I know he has promised to do, to take under his care those important sections of the Wall which are in particular danger. I have one in mind, which I shall use as an example. One of the most pleasant and important forts is known as Aesica, or Great Chesters. As I know from my own visit to it a year ago, that fort is a farmyard, and the little angle turrets of the fort were then being used as chicken runs and pigsties. It is inevitable that after treatment of that sort the stones are gradually worn down, if not displaced, and after twenty years of such treatment the archaeological and aesthetic value of the fort will be totally lost. I am pleading for really urgent action to save that fort.
I would include just one more section of the Wall for which I have a particular liking, namely, the section running through the field belonging to Black Carts farm—a section which is overgrown

with bushes and quite sturdy trees, the roots of which are eating into the core. Before many years pass the facing stones will be forced apart and that particularly fine section of the Wall will be lost for ever.
One hon. Member has already referred to the proposal of the Ministry to take all surviving remains of the Wall under its care. Some members of the public might regard such a proposal as quite disastrous, but I feel that it is absolutely essential. Hadrian's Wall is a monument unrivalled in any other part of the world, and it happens to be found in Britain. Stonehenge is also unrivalled, dating from a period at least 2,000 years earlier, but Hadrian's Wall is unequalled and we hold it in this country as a legacy in trust for all those countries of Europe to which the Roman Empire spread. It should be a national monument in fact, because it already is in spirit and history.
Having worked for three years with Ministry officials, and having discussed this matter with my right hon. Friend, I have confidence that the good taste and scholarly exactness of those officials are such that to put a monument of this antiquity and importance under their care will result in a benefit to the nation. It will not, as Mrs. Hawkes fears, create the risk that its value will be lost.

9.30 p.m.

The Parliamentary Secretary to the Ministry of Works (Mr. Harmar Nicholls): I do not think it often happens that a Minister called on to answer one of the last debates before a Recess can truly say that he welcomes the job. But I can do so on this occasion because this subject has proved a matter of real interest to many hon. Members, and there has been sufficient time to give them an opportunity to express their views. We at the Ministry welcome the opportunity given to hon. Members to put their views on record, and I can promise that many of the constructive suggestions and ideas advanced today will be examined with sympathy.
I am delighted that I follow my hon. Friend the Member for East Bournemouth and Christchurch (Mr. N. Nicolson) who, as a member of the Ancient Monuments Board, was able to speak with such authority. Much of what he said I might have included in my


reply, but I should not have been able to deal with it in anything like the same admirable way as he did. My task tonight will be to deal with the more mundane matters raised in the debate.
We at the Ministry appreciate the way in which the hon. Member for Swindon (Mr. F. Noel-Baker) opened this debate and enabled us to deal with the articles which have been published and the supporting photographs. It is right that the criticisms referred to should be answered authoritatively at the earliest moment. I do not approach this task in any apologetic vein. We at the Ministry are very proud of the quality of our work of preservation of these ancient monuments, and I was delighted to hear support for that expressed by the hon. Member for Islington, East (Mr. E. Fletcher). Any fair-minded examination of our work in the areas which have been the subject of the articles referred to would satisfy people that our pride is justified. I think, in view of the tenor of some of the articles that I am entitled to call in aid an extract from a letter received from one of the most outstanding Roman-period archæologists. He wrote a letter following the recent controversy caused by the articles, and stated:
I have seen work in progress in India, Algeria, France, Switzerland and Italy and I judge what you people do against that background, and, by God, you come out on top.
I think that is a rather good thing to know, and I consider that in the context of what has been said it is right to place it on record.

Dame Irene Ward: May we have the name of the writer?

Mr. Nicholls: I tried hard to contact the gentleman to obtain his permission to quote his name. Unfortunately, he is engaged on a "dig" and so is not at the end of a telephone. I have not his permission to give his name, otherwise I should have been delighted to do so. I have no doubt that had I managed to contact him, he would have given me permission; but I know that under the circumstances, the House will take my word that the eminence which I have accorded to him is well justified.
The criticism I wish to deal with is that directed at our methods of consolidating the remains of the Roman Wall. Hon.

Members have expressed the view that it is right that one should deal specifically with the newspaper articles and photographs which preceded Questions in this House, and which it has been admitted were the cause of this Adjournment debate.
I must say—the speech of the hon. Member for Swindon underlined this—that even these critical articles were not able to fault the general policy of our Ancient Monuments Section. There is no suggestion that the general policy is wrong or deserving of particular criticism. The charge was, as I have read it, that the implementing of that policy was at fault.
The articles suggested the use of careless workmen and the lack of general supervision, and because of that, a real risk of destroying archaeological evidence. In support of the general charge about the implementing of a policy with which they did not apparently disagree, the authors of the articles produced two sets of photographs. One photograph purported to show that the Wall, after having been uncovered, had been dismantled and the stones incorrectly replaced. The photograph to which the hon. Member for Islington, East referred, showed an easily identifiable stone, with the lichen marks on it. On the first photograph the stone appears at the bottom of the Wall. The photograph was taken before the work had started. On the second photograph, after the preservation had taken place, the same stone can be seen one course higher.

Mr. E. Fletcher: Two courses.

Mr. Nicholls: I had "two courses" on my notes, but I think if we look more closely at the photographs we will see that the difference is one course. The suggestion of these photographs is that the stone has been removed from the position shown on the first photograph.
The suggestion that this section of the Wall has been extensively rebuilt, or rebuilt at all, is absolutely wrong. In fact, the stone was in precisely the same position as it was when discovered. The first photograph shows lots of earth in front of the Wall. All the earth was cleared away in the course of the preservation, which revealed extra courses of stone work underneath. In the second photograph the stone was therefore shown


two layers higher, but was in precisely the same position in the second photograph as in the first photograph.
I hope that explanation is clear. It is not easy to see, without the photographs, what has happened. That part of the Wall has not been touched. The excess earth in front of the bottom part of the Wall has been removed, and so the second photograph naturally gave the position of the stone as being higher up. The author of the article may not have known this, but I should have thought that even a cursory observation would have suggested the obvious explanation which I have just given.
On the second photograph an attempt is made to suggest that the Wall has been extensively rebuilt, and a white line is marked on another stone which, it is rather melodramatically suggested, has been replaced. This was an isolated case among several thousand stones where one of them can be seen, in the original photograph, to be extensively fractured. It was replaced by a nearby fallen stone of the same size. This substitution was justified by the very excellent explanation given by my hon. Friend the Member for East Bournemouth and Christchurch concerning the risk that can come from ice, rain and ravages generally. To have left one part of the wall with this extensive fracture would have been rather like neglecting the beginning of decay in a tooth. Before long, the whole Wall would have disintegrated and the money spent on preserving it as an ancient monument would have been wasted. That is the explanation of the photograph, which is the basis of a suggestion that has nothing else to support it at all.
The second suggestion is that unskilled workers are being employed and that there has been carelessness. The second photograph showed a workman with pickaxe, with a dumper in the background. The suggestion clearly was that our excavation and preservation were being done in a haphazard way, and left in the hands of untrained and inexperienced people. If that is the message of the photograph, it is unfair and is certainly untrue. I will tell the House what actually happened.
This is what happens over the whole of the Department's work on any of these preservation works. In sections of about

20 yards at a time a trained archaeologist and a Departmental architect accompany the superintendent of works on to the site, and, at this high level, decide the character of the work to be undertaken and give detailed instructions to the charge-hand. In this case, the charge-hand was a man of great experience, and in his private capacity is a member of the Society of Antiquaries of Newcastle.
They pass detailed instructions through the superintendent to the charge-hand, who then instructs his leading hand and the workmen, such as those we see in the photographs, as to the detailed methods of handling and the removal of waste. He tells the workmen exactly how he wishes the work to be carried out. The method of handling and of moving it follows a drill which has been very carefully thought out and under which careful instruction is given until the men themselves have some experience of the work involved. The leading hand is on the spot the whole time the work is being carried out.
In the photograph we see only two workmen with their picks raised in a menacing fashion, but, in fact, the leading hand, who has received and understands the instructions passed from a high level, is there or thereabouts. The charge-hand may be controlling two or three other sites in the same vicinity, but he visits these points at least once a day, and on important points—and the section set out in the photograph was regarded as an important point—it is not a matter of visiting only once a day because he spends most of his time there. When this has been done and the work has proceeded, the superintendent of works comes back at least every ten days, and sometimes more often, to check over the type and quality of the work which has been carried out according to the instructions which he has previously given. Later the archeologist and the architect again inspect to see how their instructions are being carried out, say every two months.
That is the way in which the ancient monuments section of our Department carries out these works. This procedure is meticulously carried out, and because it is generally appreciated that it is carried out with care and thought, even the authors of the article, after having


given this great message of carelessness and unskilled work, could merely say:
It would be unfair to say that historical evidence is being lost.
They fell back on the rather nebulous hypothesis that "it could be lost". The fact that this weak charge follows the rather menacing photographs is not without significance.
Having dealt with the photographs and the articles, I know that the House will recognise that that is only one infinitesimal part of the work which the Ministry is carrying out, and it might be helpful if briefly I remind the House what our policy is in the conservation of all ancient monuments. Our policy is to arrest the processes of decay at a point which they have reached when we take over the responsibility. That is the basis of our policy and all the instructions on the work in hand flow from that.
Our object is to avoid interference with their authenticity and, at the same time, to give maximum protection against the ravages of rain, ice, wind, snow and, as my hon. Friend the Member for East Bournemouth and Christchurch said, sheep and trippers. My hon. Friend also said that this policy and these objectives have the full support of the Ancient Monuments Board for England, an outstanding and authoritative body. They would also have the full support of all informed archaeological opinion throughout the country, whether on the Board or not. The Ministry's methods have been kept constantly under review and, as my hon. Friend said, they were recently approved by the Ancient Monuments Board.
The Ministry's methods have also met with the approval of outside archaeologists of repute, to whom reference has already been made. Professor Ian Richmond, formerly of Durham and now at Oxford, was closely associated with our work on the Wall. Professor Birley, who is Professor Richmond's successor, is professor of Roman history and archaeology at the University of Durham, and he has also been quoted in support of our methods. Mr. Gillam, also of Durham, has been closely associated with our work, and the letter written by Mr. Gillam and Professor Birley was, thanks to the persistence of

my hon. Friend the Member for Tyne-mouth (Dame Irene Ward), quoted in support of our general approach to these matters.
I could repeat many of the references to our work which have been made by hon. Members, but that would be an unnecessary repetition. By and large, this debate has brought out the fact that people were disturbed by these articles and photographs. It is right that they should have had the explanation which I am very pleased to have been able to give. On the whole, one has felt throughout the debate, which has gone on rather longer than we expected, a sense of unity in support of the methods adopted by my Department in trying to preserve these ancient monuments for the good of the country. I would assure the House that many of the criticisms which have recently been made of our work, with some appearance of validity, are, in fact, unfounded, and I hope that the explanations which have been given will satisfy the House.
I am grateful to the hon. Member for Swindon for having introduced the debate. I repeat that we will certainly take into account all the suggestions which have been made, where they can be put into operation, and the debate will certainly not have been a waste of time.
The hon. Member for Swindon asked if I could indicate the state of affairs at Stonehenge. I assure him that the work is proceeding according to plan. Some of the smaller stones have been moved and their sites are at the moment being explored under the direction of Professor Piggott and Mr. Atkinson. We hope next month to proceed with the erection of a few of the stones which have been referred to. The preliminary work has been carried out satisfactorily and we are now getting on to the bigger job of moving the stones. I have no doubt that in Parliamentary Question and Answer after the Recess we can give further reports about the situation.
This debate has been helpful to the Department, and we welcome the suggestions which have been made. I hope that my explanation of the points which I know were causing concern will be found to be satisfactory, and that next time when a debate takes place on this absorbing subject we shall have the good fortune to have the same amount of time


that we have had this evening so that hon. Members can express their views fully.

Mr. F. Noel-Baker: We are very grateful to the Parliamentary Secretary for having dealt with the allegations at some length. May I ask him if he can say when he thinks the Department will he able to make some public announcement about the results of the work at Avebury?

Mr. Nicholls: I can say a word on that subject now, but I did not want to widen the debate, as we had intended to deal primarily with Hadrian's Wall. However, we have had more time than we expected. When the present operation at Stonehenge is completed, we hope to turn our attention to limited excavations at Avebury. At present no work is actually in hand there. We shall work out our plans in consultation with the Ancient Monuments Board and we shall hope to have the assistance of experts to supervise and advise on the work to he done.

9.50 p.m.

Mr. Anthony Greenwood: This has been a valuable debate, not least because of the extremely clear exposition by the Parliamentary Secretary of the Ministry's policy. I am sure we are all grateful to him for his speech, just as we are grateful to my hon. Friend the Member for Swindon (Mr. F. Noel-Baker) for having chosen this subject for discussion tonight. This is not the first time my hon. Friend has placed us under an obligation to him. About two or three years ago he initiated a debate on prehistoric monuments in South-West England which also, I think, produced one of the most interesting debates it has been my privilege to attend.
One of the really pleasant features of these debates on matters of this kind is that they always give us an opportunity of paying tribute to the Inspectorate of Ancient Monuments. We all admire the scholarly and practical approach which the Inspectorate adopts to matters of this kind, and when I find that it advises upon a course of action I have a great inclination to agree, in spite of certain preliminary doubts I may experience.
On this occasion I am left with only one doubt, that although the machinery for supervision, to which the Parliamentary Secretary referred, is obviously

adequate, I wonder whether it always works as efficiently and consistently as it might and whether, perhaps, sometimes we have human failures, which may have been in this case at least magnified out of all proportion.
The Parliamentary Secretary referred to the photographs in the Observer which were taken by Mr. David Moore. I must confess that my anxieties are not completely allayed by the explanation which the Parliamentary Secretary gave, because some of the stones in the immediate proximity of the lichen-covered stone to which he referred do not seem to me to be the same shape in both photographs. It may be as well if the hon. Gentleman can arrange for a careful examination to be carried out on the spot to satisfy himself that more drastic reconstruction has not taken place than appears to be the case from the view which he now holds.
I do not doubt for a moment that the general policy of the Ministry is right. We had a remarkable speech from the hon. Member for Bournemouth, East and Christchurch (Mr. N. Nicolson), and I hope he will not take it amiss when I say that all of us wish him well in the struggle which he is carrying on against the ancient monuments in his own Conservative Association. It was, no doubt, characteristic modesty on the hon. Gentleman's part which prevented him from quoting the advice which the Ancient Monuments Board gave to the Minister in its last Annual Report. It discussed the methods of preservation which could be employed and took the view that it was in broad agreement with the method of preservation used by the Ministry.
I do not think any of us would question that the general policy of the Ministry is the right one, but, as hon. Gentlemen on both sides of the House have said, we cannot lightly brush aside the views of so distinguished and scholarly an archaeologist as Jacquetta Hawkes, and I wonder myself whether the truth may lie in one of the remarks which she made in a letter to the Observer on 2nd February of this year, when she expressed the view that the Ministry's policy was sound, and then went on to say
But it is a long way from the desk to the field"—
meaning presumably that there is a good deal of scope for mistakes to take


place between the formulation of policy by the Ministry and the actual carrying of it out on the spot.
I hope that the Parliamentary Secretary and his right hon. Friend will go carefully into this matter again. We all of us endorse the broad lines of policy which they are carrying out, but we do, I think, just wonder, even at the end of the very persuasive speech we have heard from the Parliamentary Secretary, whether at times rather closer supervision should be provided and whether mistakes are being made which could be rectified with a little greater attention to details.

9.55 p.m.

Mr. F. H. Hayman: I rise at this late hour to make just a short intervention. I would say at once that I am not an expert at all on this subject but simply an

interested tripper from time to time to ancient monuments.
The speech of the hon. Member for Bournemouth, East and Christchurch (Mr. N. Nicolson) was so striking that I felt persuaded that all he said was right. On the other hand, my experience as a Member of Parliament and my previous experience lead me to believe that experts will differ and that the ordinary person must form the best judgment he can.
There was one point made by the hon. Member for Bournemouth, East and Christchurch to which the Parliamentary Secretary did not reply. It referred to the part of the Wall and fort now used as a farmyard and a chicken run. I hope it will be within the scope of the Ministry, if necessary, to acquire that land so as to prevent unnecessary deterioration.

Question put and agreed to.

Adjourned accordingly at four minutes to Ten o'clock.